


Kin

by grayglube



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Foster kids, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2016-06-10
Packaged: 2018-02-19 23:04:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2406149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I think everyone should have a family.” Her daddy smiles, whole and happy, but her momma’s is smaller, gentler. Life starting. For her. And someone else, too. Maybe. (AU foster siblings)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> AU in which Pastor Fuller and his wife adopt the Gecko brothers and they grow up alongside Kate. Seth is the older brother in this.

Late at night Kate can hear her parents talk in whispers. Her mother’s firm ‘no’ and her father’s soft ‘think it over, pray on it.’ She’s eleven and thinks she’s very wise for her age. Her mother says she has an old soul. Her father says she’s growing up with a strong sense of God’s grace.

She’s counting down the time until her twelfth birthday.

It’s three months away, but it’s the date she’s set up in her mind, not just because it’s a service day and a birthday for the first time she can remember but because she’s told her daddy it’s going to be her baptism.

And with all the gravity an eleven year old can have she thinks, in a level sort of way, that these sorts of things, the life changing things...the life  starting things should all come together in some special way. She’s told her momma. She’d smiled and said she was a good girl, a smart girl, and that she was proud. 

Full circle. 

Kate is an only child. Her parents talk back and forth about it, her momma says it’s up to God and her daddy says he thinks God has already told them what they should do.

But, her daddy’s a pastor and her momma worries so much about others that Kate thinks it’s hard for her to worry about  their family too.

“I need to think about it.” 

Kate hears her mother say in the kitchen before she’s walked all the way down the stairs, before her parents can see her. Breakfast smells like blueberry waffles for her, hash-browns and coffee for her daddy and cinnamon oatmeal for her momma. 

Her daddy says good morning and his smile is bright like the sun. He kisses her momma on the cheek once, her shoulder pops up a little and a smile stretches her cheek, “I’ll think about it pastor. Okay,” she claps her hands. “Breakfast time. Kate?”

And Kate sits and says one of the things she always says before breakfast, a favorite proverb of the week or a small little girl sermon of daily faith and peace and love. The world from a child’s eyes, her daddy says, her mother squeezes her hand.

Her daddy smiles down at the table, catches her reaching for the syrup before she’s finished, one eye cracked open and a friendly wink that her momma catches and taps both of them for.

“Kate?”

“Yes?”

“What would you think if we open our home to other children?”

“You mean like adopt?”

“Jenny” her daddy starts.

“Jacob, I think Kate has a say too.”

“I think everyone should have a family.”

Her daddy smiles, whole and happy, but her momma’s is smaller, gentler. And they look at each other, peck each other a kiss and Kate forks a waffle. 

Life starting. For her. And someone else, too. Maybe. 

All good things, she thinks. She wonders and waits.

* * *

 

 

The boys, two of them, arrive three days before her birthday. She’s not upset, not even when her momma has to leave to go change the sheets when one of them, small and nervous and nauseous pukes in his bed and Kate is left sitting next to the sewing machine, waiting for her momma to come back and finish hemming her baptism robe, it’s white but she needs another layer under it.

 

Her momma doesn’t come back for awhile.

 

She’s not supposed to touch the sewing machine, but she can hem by hand. She’s putting in the modesty panels and someone’s in the doorway.

 

“Are you making curtains?”

 

Kate looks up.

 

She holds up her robe, “It’s for my birthday, my baptism.”

 

“Aren’t you a little old for that?”

 

Kate smiles, sews another two stitches, “Maybe. Which one of you was sick?”

 

“Me.”

 

Behind his glasses he looked pale and his forehead is shiny, “Are you okay now?”

 

He nods. Stares at her without ever coming further into the room. 

 

“Did you rip it?”

 

“It’s so it’s not see through.”

 

“Because you have to naked?”

 

The question makes her mouth drop open, but she shuts it, despite her cheeks getting hot, his stare and blank expression make it hard to tell if he’s trying to instigate something, her daddy told her it might be a tough transition for the two of them.

 

Told her to give them time.

 

“No, we don’t have to be naked.”

 

“So are we going to have to wear white dresses and get dunked in a lake too?”

 

Instigating.

 

She tries hard not to frown, one of her stitches tangles, she has to cut it out and put it in again.

 

“Not unless you want to.”

 

“Where’s the bathroom?”

 

She puts down the robe and gets up, “I’ll show you.”

 

There’s one connected to her parents room, but her daddy is sleeping so she shows him the one downstairs.

 

“There it is.”

 

He stares at her expectantly.

 

“I don’t really need to use the bathroom.”

 

He walks past her, and to the fridge, looks inside, shuts it. Kate watches. “What are you doing?”

 

“You’re mom’s been three feet away for the entire time we’ve been here. I just wanted to look around without her crawling up my ass.”

 

“Don’t curse, Richard.”

 

He stares at her for a long time. It makes her feel stupid for chastising him.

 

Give them time . “Sorry.” She says, looks at her toes, squishes them against the tea-brown tiles.

 

He opens the fridge again, his glasses reflect the light against the dimmed down kitchen. “Is this your cake?”

 

“Yeah, we need to put icing on it still.”

 

“I like icing.”

 

“Me too.”

 

“You can call me Richie.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“Tonight when me and Seth go to sleep your dad won’t try to sneak in and jerk us off, will he?”

 

“No. Why would you ask something like that?” Her cheeks feel hot again, shame, pity, anger. Single emotions brought up by simple words,  give him time .

 

“Are you lying?”

 

“No! Of course not.” 

 

Anger.

 

“Good. I’d set him on fire in his sleep if he did.” 

 

Fear.

 

“You shouldn’t say things like that.” 

 

Anger, again.

 

“People shouldn’t try to touch kids.”

 

Discomfort.

 

“Did somebody touch you?”

 

Pity.

 

“A pervert put his hand down my pants, once.” Richard grins at her as he turns, sways against the fridge door in a way her momma always tells her not to cause she might break it.

 

“Did you tell someone?”

 

Concern.

 

“I didn’t have to, I poured grits over his hand at breakfast. He had to get a finger taken off. That was the last house we were at. His wife liked tropical fish, she knew, Seth put bleach in their tank before the social worker came to get us.”

 

“Nothing bad will happen to you here. I promise.”

 

“Swear.”

 

Kate doesn’t think twice, “I swear.”

 

“If you’re lying, I’ll eat your cake.”

 

“Kate?”

 

Richard is already shutting the bathroom door behind him as her mom comes down the stairs.

 

“Oh, Kate. Don’t leave the fridge open honey. It’s too late to eat now.”

 

“I was just bored, sorry. Richie said he felt sick again. I didn’t want to just leave him.”

 

Her mother’s gentle smile makes her wrinkles show, the toilet flushes in the bathroom. The water runs. And Kate’s mother says she’ll show Richie to bed while Kate puts on her pajamas.

 

With no other choice but to leave, Kate goes and at the top of the stairs Seth sits, legs outstretched and arms crossed on his knees. “Where’s Richie?”

 

“Bathroom.”

 

“You’re house is nice.”

 

“Thanks. My mom is coming up.” She holds out a hand, he let’s her pull him up.

 

“Your mom is weird.”

 

“Sometimes,” Kate nods. The words come easy, words she can’t ever think herself without feeling guilty. “She’s sick, I think. She’s been sad for awhile.”

 

“Why?”

 

Kate inclines her head to listen to her mother downstairs, the bathroom cabinet opens, the squeaky metal banging as it shuts, and the soft soothing words adults give to sick kids as they give them medicine for hurting bellies and scraped knees and stick a thermometer in their mouths.

 

In the boys room, plain and clean and a little cold from the open window to air out the smell of someone being sick she tells Seth in as few words as possible, because that’s how people explain bad things. Or should, Kate isn’t sure. Maybe it’s just the way people talk about things they know they should feel bereaved about but don’t really because it isn’t a bad thing that’s happened to them, only someone they know. 

 

“She lost her baby, last year.”

 

Seth says ‘oh,’ nods. Spreads out on his bed, Kate says goodnight, sews stitches and pretends nonchalance as her momma and Richie walk by, she hears his ‘goodnight, Kate’, but looks up too slow to give him one back.

 

Her momma shakes her head fondly, “I thought I said it was time for pajamas.” Kate asks if she can finish the lining first. Her momma shakes her head but promises to teach her the sewing machine after school. 

 

It will be the last at school day before her baptism and the boy’s first day at a new school. 

 

Kate thinks there’s a certain sort of symmetry in it, she goes to bed wondering if the boys are happy, or, at least not scared, and that it’s not too cold with the window open.

 

* * *

 

 

The boy’s are quiet and polite. Though Seth looks everywhere but at the person he talks too and Richie stares at everyone. 

 

On her birthday they all have cake, it’s a small party because the boys need to acclimate , her dad says, and all of her friends might be too much at once.

 

But her momma let’s her go to a sleepover.

 

Kate tries not to feel guilty, but she does, and at nine at night feigns a stomach ache, even though it’s sinful to lie and it’s only her first day of actual accountability for her sins, and someone’s mother calls hers to come and get her.

 

She’s in the back seat, curled up. 

 

Her mother says she must have gotten sick because of other kids now. 

 

Kate says she hope Seth doesn’t catch it too.

 

Her mother peeks back at her at a red light and says she’s sorry her birthday ended with her getting sick.

 

“Maybe it’s a blessing, maybe I should be home.”

 

Her mother’s smile gets a little smaller, “Yes, maybe. Close your eyes so you don’t get car sick.”

 

* * *

 

 

At Christmas she explains they are going to a midnight  service  not a mass, they shrug off the difference.

 

She tries to explain but eventually her daddy hears them at the kitchen table and sits down to answer questions she’s never really needed to ask about things regarding her church. 

 

It’s strange but she learns something too.

 

On New Year’s they light up sparklers and the neighbors burn their christmas tree, her momma frowns, they can see the little fire through the fence slats. It's disrespectful she says. Kate hears Seth tell Richie that so is putting it out on the curb for the garbage man who won’t pick it up for a week. Kate spins her sparkler between her thumb and ring finger, ponders the thought and decides he’s right. 

 

* * *

 

 

Easter is next.

 

They hunt for eggs in the park and at lunch her daddy asks if the boys want to say grace. 

 

Instantly she is worried, not that they won’t but that they do and are bad about it.

 

Seth shakes his head and Richie says he doesn’t know how. 

 

On either side of her, her parents’ hands in hers relax the grips they didn’t know had tightened.

 

Kate says she will.

 

And, Seth grins at her a little, Richie stares at her while both their eyes should be closed.

 

* * *

 

 

At the end of Spring they set up the inflatable pool, she floats on her back once the sun sets and watches the stars come out. Her momma lets her get a bikini, it has a long top, at the department store she comes out disappointed and a little angry.

 

When her mother asks what’s wrong Kate frowns. Feels like crying.

 

“I shouldn’t worry about it but I do.” She crosses her arms over small breasts and holds out a rejected bathing suit that doesn’t fit, gapes empty where other girls’ aren’t.

 

“Oh, honey. It’s okay. We all worry about things like that.”

 

Four days later, she gets her period at school.

 

In the nurses office, lying down she hears Seth.

 

He jammed a finger playing basketball in gym. He sits down in the quiet room with cots and asks if she’s okay.

 

Stomach ache.

 

He looks at her funny and then at the doorless gap at empty chairs and a little microwave  where the nurses heat up their lunch and the fridge where the diabetic kids keep their insulin and juice boxes.

 

“Really? Or is it because…” 

 

Her face get’s hot and her head hurts and she feels like she so embarrassed she’s going to cry.

 

“Because.” She answers.

 

“If you ask they give you tylenol, I think.”

 

She tells him they did already.

 

He doesn’t say anything else and she faces the wall. Embarrassed tears. She hopes he doesn’t tell everyone. Her momma picks her up and takes her to the drug store.

 

She tells her it’s a good thing, that it means she’s growing up.

 

* * *

 

 

Seth and Richie have the same birthday, twelve hours and a year apart. Richie wants the same caked she had, Seth wants ice cream instead. Her dad helps make them.

 

Seth is fourteen and Richie is thirteen before she is.

 

But they look happy and she takes pictures with a disposable camera she bought on her own. She wraps it and gives it to Richie, because he seems to remember things better than Seth, and for the both of them she helps pick out clothes.

 

They look underwhelmed but hide it. She giggles, better her than her dad who would get khakis and polos or her mom out alone thinking basketball shorts and jerseys are the things to buy. No, blue jeans and t-shirts and a sweater for them each and things they can rip when they climb fences and fall off the trampoline.

 

* * *

 

 

School is over and her Daddy is counseling people at the church who are having a hard time in their marriage, her momma is watering the flowers. Kate is going to camp. The boys are staying behind. It’s too soon her daddy said, but they told Kate they don’t really want to go. 

 

They distrust other kids and loathe authority figures.

 

She’s come in to pack and she hears them in their room, the door is closed but her room is next to theirs, she tries to be quiet when she slips her ear against the wall, knees making her bed creak. 

 

“Spit first.” 

 

“Ouch!”

 

“Shhh.”

 

She hears sounds, a quiet groan.

 

“It went all over.”

 

“Sorry.”

 

“Ewww. That’s not funny.”

 

There are hysterical giggles and someone leaving, down the stairs.

 

And Kate knows, she looks at the wall, hard. Knows that boys are gross and do stuff. And she also knows that it’s none of her business, that stuff like that is  private . But, Richie and Seth are brothers. She wonders if it’s a boy thing. When she was in first grade, at a sleepover, she sucked Melissa Shorlie’s tongue in her mouth, and they laughed too and did it some more until her older sister told them it was gross and then told their mom who told her momma and Kate wasn’t allowed to sleepover anymore, so Kate isn’t sure if boys do things like that too.

 

There’s a knock on the wall.

 

And another, Kate sits very still and wonders if it’s Seth or Richie.

 

She feels guilty and ashamed for not letting them keep what’s  private private. She knocks back and suddenly, Seth or Richie, it’s Richie, is out of their room and standing in the opening doorway of hers.

 

He stares at her.

 

“I wouldn’t tell.”

 

He nods.

 

“That stuff is private.”

 

No nods, just a stare.

 

“I didn’t mean to hear.”

 

“Sorry.”

 

She shakes her head. “It’s okay,” she tries for a smile. “You’re boys.” Like it explains everything, it might. She doesn’t know. 

 

But Richie doesn’t look very convinced, so Kate wonders if maybe boys don’t normally do gross things, and then instantly feels like she’s given away secret information. 

 

“I’m not stupid, Richie. I know what boys do.”

 

“Do you?”

 

“Sorta, yeah. Girls do things too.”

 

“Like what?”

 

“It’s private.”

 

“Do you do private things?”

 

“I think everybody does.”

 

His nose crinkles. “That would be gross.”

 

She nods, mouth pursing. “Yeah. I guess.”

 

* * *

 

 

The have more christmases and easters and birthdays and the boys talk more and her dad puts out a curse jar, Seth puts in the most, but what makes her dad most surprised is when the runner up is her and not Richie. She gets nudged under the table for it a lot. 

 

It’s like a joke they all share.

 

Richie has to put in a nickel every time he rolls his eyes though so they end up about even since Kate has to put in a quarter like Seth for bad words.

 

* * *

 

 

Seth kisses a girl named Vanessa in the cafeteria right before the bell rings to say the buses will be leaving, Kate sees them one day, she’s on her way to the track for cross country practice.

 

They see her, Seth introduces her as his sister and she smiles back. Vanessa asks if she wants to hang out after school one day, her jacket smells like cigarettes and Seth has one behind his ear. 

 

She says she has to ask first but that she’d like too, and then she tells Seth to not let their dad see the cigarette. He salutes her and she runs the rest of the way to practice so she isn’t late.

 

* * *

 

 

Richie turns fifteen first and Seth is learning to drive. Her dad and him are out practicing in the empty parking lot outside the church, her mother is grocery shopping. 

 

Kate is doing her earth science report on rocks, which are boring and tasteless, and that’s her first sentence and she can’t get any further because the boys’ room is still next to hers and Richie’s bed keeps squeaking.

 

He’s masturbating. 

 

Masturbating.

 

She learned the word Vanessa. Trading secrets in the backyard on the trampoline, and Kate was thirsty for new vocabulary words, and secret techniques.

 

Vanessa, a year older, knew more than Kate thought anyone did. 

 

But the shower head isn’t one you can take off in their house and Kate doesn’t really think fingers feel good inside. She’s tried but is too worried her bed squeaks too, so she doesn’t  do it unless she’s alone upstairs.

 

And even when they aren’t home it’s usually daytime, and things aren’t as private in the daytime.

 

She drops her index card box with definitions in it on the floor, she doesn’t mean too. Richie’s bed still squeaks, and then it stops and she thinks he’s biting his pillow, because he coughs a few seconds later and sometimes she’s walked in and there’s a circle of teeth imprinted in saliva on his mint green pillowcase, like he’s just been doing something.

 

There’s a knock on the wall.

 

It’s weird.

 

And gross.

 

Kate rolls her eyes. Knocks on her desk. She hears Richie laugh.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s her fifteenth birthday. She stopped liking red velvet cake a year ago because she learned it was made of beets and once she’d known it never tasted the same. Seth nods, says it looks like you’ve eaten a human being once you’ve finished a piece, but Richie still likes it and Seth makes dirty jokes about girls on their period that Kate doesn’t get until it’s hindsight twenty-twenty.

 

By the time her mother needed to know what she was supposed to be baking the boys said they would decide and Kate just said ‘whatever,’ she doesn’t mind surprises.

 

They put a cake dome over a platter and sing happy birthday and when they proudly reveal their surprise she can’t breathe, just laughs, her daddy shakes his head, her mother puts her chin on her palm and hides her smile.

 

Birthday meatloaf with her name written across it in ketchup and a one and five candle.

 

She tells them they’re stupid, and laughs and laughs and laughs.

 

* * *

 

 

Her dad installs another bathroom on the second floor. 

 

She thinks it’s because someone always has to pee when someone else is in the shower or an elbow always ends up knocking someone’s toothbrush out of someone else’s mouth and into the toilet. Richie says it’s because her dad doesn’t want her walking in on someone doing something private. 

 

She raises her eyebrows and he just keeps eating his cereal with her on the porch while her dad and her uncle caulk the tub.

 

* * *

 

 

They are all invited to Vanessa’s sweet sixteen. Seth knows first, because he says he has to light a candle on the cake and Kate doesn’t really know what that has to do with anything but she thinks it’s Vanessa’s way of knowing for absolute sure Seth isn’t kissing other girls, or really it’s so Vanessa knows that Seth knows he’s isn’t allowed to kiss other girls.

 

And Kate get’s an invitation two weeks before on lavender card paper in a black envelope with a butterfly sticker stencil on it and a lollipop taped to the front that she thinks it’s supposed to be an exclamation point at the end of her name because it’s on upside down.

 

And since it says plus one and semi-formal Seth tells her she has to take Richie.

 

Her mom takes pictures of them in semi-formal apparel on the porch.

 

At the party, while inside the golf club dancehall other kids Cha-Cha-Slide, Kate stands on the balcony porch while Richie smokes a cigarette.

 

A lot of the girls sitting at the table where Vanessa had set up a game where everyone does silly dares complained because of the smoke.

 

Kate uses it as an excuse to leave, she doesn’t like dare games. Richie offers her his cigarette, she doesn’t inhale, just blows out the acrid cloud she’s sucked into her mouth.

 

Richie wants to sneak off to the golf course and see if they can get to the driving range.

 

Kate thinks they probably lock up all the clubs after it closes, she tells him that and he looks disappointed.

 

“Are you going to do this next year?”

 

Kate shakes her head.

 

“Oh, no.” Richie sounds disappointed but when she peeks at him he puts on a face and in a shrill voice says, ‘You have to! You promised I could light a candle! You promised!’

 

Kate shoves him, he grins wickedly, wagging his cigarette up and down.

 

Later when they get home, she’s washing her face and he’s brushing his teeth at the narrow sink counter, she looks at the top of his head as he spits a gob of blue minty stuff towards the drain and then where his face always used to be is his throat and she says ‘woah.’

 

And she asks how he got so tall.

 

Richie shrugs says he drinks his milk. Seth, walking past snorts, head coming around the open door frame, still in his blazer and slacks, button down untucked and open at the collar, “It’s because he jerks off a lot,” Seth stands on his tip toes and mimes an orgasm and rolls his eyes up into his head, Kate thinks he’s trying to make a comparison about something but she just isn’t understanding it, not completely anyway.

 

“Seth’s still short because Vanessa sucks out all his vital nutrients.”

 

Kate stuck in the middle, pushes out with a grimace and a ‘so disgusting,’ they stand in the bathroom making hand gestures and she slams her door on their laughter, and Seth trying to do some damage to Richie over the Vanessa thing.

 

Alone in bed Kate wonders if it’s true.

 

She tries to think of a way to ask Vanessa that doesn’t give away that Richie mentioned it or that Seth told Richie or that Kate wants to know about blowjobs for anything other than curiosity.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s summer vacation again and Kate is swimming in a real pool, she’s alone, Seth and Vanessa vanished for ice pops and wine coolers inside the house twenty minutes ago and Kate doesn’t know if that’s true or not.

 

Vanessa comes back without Seth and says he’s looking for snacks.

 

Kate reads a magazine in Vanessa’s hammock and Vanessa is trying to blow up a pool float. Seth has a cardboard caddy of four winecoolers and a bag of ruffle chips. Vanessa groans, “took you long enough,” and Kate smirks down at the magazine, ties to make sense of pie charts related to female orgasm or a poll of best ways to give oral sex. It’s cosmopolitan and at home her mother rips out the articles she;s most interested in before she can steal them away.

 

Seth shakes his head, sits down in the patchy grass and tries to kiss Vanessa, she turns her head and proclaims that he took too long and that while he was gone she decided she was a lesbian and that she was leaving him for Kate.

 

Kate looks up, big eyes and Vanessa has a knee up on the hammock, making the net pitch towards her, and her kiss tastes like the rubber nipple of the pool float and her tongue tastes gamey and weird when it slips over the top of hers. Vanessa pulls back and Seth has gone a different color, coughing on a chip and a splash of purple red wine-cooler down the bob of his throat. He’s laughing and Vanessa pummels him, straddles him in soffe shorts and her bikini top. 

 

Kate hears the double beep of a car that they seem to miss.

 

“Nessa, your mom’s back.”

 

“Shit!”

 

They hide the wine-coolers under the half-inflated float and Seth is still laughing and Kate tells Vanessa she needs a breath mint.

 

They stay out until her momma comes to pick them up. Richie is in the passenger seat.

 

Her momma runs into the house fast to take something off the broiler and Kate gets out, is almost to the house when she realizes the boys are still in the car, Seth leaning from the back seat to tell Richie something. She walks back to the car.

 

“But Vanessa forgot that she didn’t brush her teeth afterwards.” She hears Seth tell Richie as she’s about to slap a palm on the driver’s side window to make them jump.

 

They look up at her, Seth horrified, Richie with a smile starting, “Eww, are you telling him Vanessa tried to make me her girlfriend? Grow up.”

 

They get out of the car.

 

Richie waiting on the other side and Seth with his arms over the hood, “Tell Richie what you said after she did it though.”

 

She struggles to remember, “That she needed a mint.” 

 

Seth dissolves in giggles, Richie tells him it isn’t funny and walks away, angry. Seth shrugs, Kate shrugs back.

 

A week goes by before Richie tells her Vanessa gave Seth a blowjob before she kissed her and Kate brushes her teeth four times, her tongue stings and she doesn’t talk to either of them for two days.

 

* * *

 

 

Seth gets a growth spurt and Richie losses all his baby fat when they are all officially in high school after summer ends.

 

And they ask Kate if she’s still the same cup size.

 

“The lord giveth,” Seth starts, waving a hand at himself.

 

“And the lord taketh away.” Richie finishes, pointing at her chest.

 

She’s angry and mortified and is spiteful to them every day until one day during a basketball game Seth stops running and hunches over, walks off the court and tells his coach he can’t breathe.

 

In the emergency room she holds Richie’s hand as hard as he holds hers. The doctor, tall in her high heels with a navy blue stethoscope around her lapels and hair so long it seems like a health hazard not to have up tells her parents that it’s a spontaneous injury. Lots of boys with Seth’s build get it. Tall and skinny and a chest wall that is trying to keep up. 

 

He’s in the hospital for nine days and Richie throws a fit that he has to go to school and can’t stay.

 

Seth comes home and shows her the stitches where they put a chest tube in to let out all the air around his lung. 

 

The same night Richie doesn’t knock on the wall but she hears them try to be quiet on the other side of it. She hears Richie in the bathroom brushing his teeth at one in the morning, she walks past on her way downstairs, she’s thirsty.

 

And nosy. 

 

On her way up the stairs, Richie asks her what she’s doing. She takes a sip of orange juice, tired, trying to ignore that he’s fifteen and Seth is sixteen and that he’d already brushed his teeth earlier and that Seth is just home from the hospital, and that she’s jealous and her only kiss was a joke and then another bigger joke. 

 

“Going to bed. I have to be up for practice in the morning.”

 

He’s wearing sweatpants and his glasses are hanging off the curled-down waist, she’s lonely she realizes. But she doesn’t tell him that and he walks into his room first and she drinks her orange juice in bed.

 

* * *

 

 

She breaks her right wrist after she doesn’t clear a hurdle. It’s at a practice and it ruins her hopes at track and field, she didn’t make Cross Country J.V. and after she gets it casted at the doctor’s office her father forced her into when it swelled up to the size of navel orange and turned purple she’s in a foul mood. 

 

Her legs are fuzzy and Vanessa is grounded so she can’t help her shave them.

 

She nicks her ankle and leaves three bloody footprint on the bathroom floor.

 

Richie puts the band-aid on for her and tells her boys don’t care about hairy legs, he says it very seriously and pushes a finger up her prickly calf, she pulls her leg off the toilet seat and tells him Vanessa only shaves her legs if Seth comes over.

 

Richie tells her Seth has to shave his pubes now because Vanessa got one stuck between her teeth and her mom saw and that’s why she can’t see Seth and why he’s been in such a bad mood.

 

Kate hides her pink girl razors in her room.

 

* * *

 

 

She’s on student council with a boy from church. His name is Kyle. He kisses her in the back of the church in a sunday school room while they’re cleaning up. Seth sees, whistles. 

 

“Preacher’s daughter strikes again.” 

 

Kyle looks confused and then steps back like he’s been splashed with hot water. 

 

Kate is so angry she could spit. Seth is her ride but she wishes she could walk instead. She won’t speak to him in the car.

 

She doesn’t talk to him at all until she can hear him tell Richie. “Why do you always have to go around talking about other people’s business?”

 

His head cocks sideways, eyebrow raised, “I don’t know, you were the one making out in Jesus’s day care center. Sorry, if I interrupted, I feel bad for ruining your chances at a first fingerbang.”

 

Richie shifts in her side view, looks at her and then down, digging into his pocket.

 

Kate doesn’t like his quiet expression. If it wouldn’t get her grounded for the next two weeks, she would steer forward and slap Seth. Instead she shakes in place, “Oh my god! It was a kiss. One. Not everyone is like Vanessa, Seth.”

 

“Fuck you, Kate.” Venom in his voice, he pushes past her and out in the hall. “Seth wait. I’m sorry!” she wails, but there are loud stomping feet on the stairs before a door slams. 

 

Kate wilts onto the nearest bed with hands on her face.

 

“I am such a bitch.”

 

Richie jimmies open the window, looms down near fresh air, speaks to outside, “He’s just being a dick.”

 

“He’s been so.... mean . About everything! What’s his malfunction?”

 

The click of a lighter and she looks. He’s blowing smoke. “Don’t mention Vanessa for awhile, she isn’t talking to him.”

 

“What? Why not?”

 

Richie’s grin is slow and secret. “I shouldn’t tell you. But he didn’t make me swear. So, should I tell you?”

 

“No. It’s not my business.”

 

And she knows it isn’t her business, repeats it over and over again but finally, “Okay, tell me.”

 

“Tell you what?” He’s smirking, head inclined to the side once he’s blown out smoke. She puts a hip on the windowsill, watches someone, probably Seth walk down the dark almost nighttime street. Everything is indigo and the trees are inky on the horizon.

 

“What’s going on with Seth and Vanessa.”

 

“Oh,” Richie sucks in a drag, lips curling, laugh coming out with the smoke, controlled, no coughing, “She wants him to lick her pussy and he hasn’t and keeps not licking her pussy every time he sees her.”

 

She plucks the cigarette from between his fingers, inhales, rolls her eyes, “Could you not say that word?”

 

“Pussy?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because I’m a girl and it’s rude.”

 

She passes back the cigarette, sits on the edge of his bed. He whispers very slowly, “Vagina.”

 

“Don’t say that either.”

 

He nods his head, expression jovial, and more than a bit condescending, “Is this a girl thing?”

 

“No, just...you don’t have to say anything besides ‘lick her’, I know what it means.”

 

“Do I have to put quarters in the curse jar?”

 

He flops down next to her and tugs on the back of her shirt until she’s on her back next to him and they are both contemplating the ceiling.

 

“I promise I won’t tell momma that you told me Seth won’t lick Vanessa’s pussy like three times and didn’t put money in.”

 

“Out of context that makes Seth sound like a cheap hooker.”

 

Kate shuts her eyes and kicks out her legs, suddenly angry again, “He is  such  a cheap hooker. Do you have any more cigarettes?”

 

They smoke, silently until Richie’s head turns and he asks, “So what do you call it?”

 

“You mean a...girl’s stuff?”

 

“Yeah,  stuff .”

 

“Ewww.”

 

“What?”

 

“The way you said it. Like:  stuff a verb, to put inside.”

 

“You are weird. Answer the question.”

 

“I don’t know. I mean, it’s weird, like it’s just another part.”

 

“Well all the other parts have names, arm, leg, head.”

 

“Well, okay. Maybe it’s not just another part. Pussy sounds like someone making fun of it.”

 

“So it’s an  it .”

 

“It’s not a mythical creature. You should write about it in a journal if you think it’s so interesting.”

 

“I have a journal.” 

 

His sudden admission makes her turn her head, “Do you?”

 

“Maybe.”

 

“Uh-huh.”

 

“I write about pussy in it.”

 

She’s going to ask about him and Seth. And her and him. And how he knocks on the wall and she knocks back but she doesn’t. She likes the answer she’s already convinced herself of. They are just sticking together. It other ways too, sharing spoons and tying each other’s shoes and heads on shoulders and bandaids and growing pains and all the stuff they might be ashamed of if anyone else knew or if one them knew doesn’t matter so much because only they know. She’s sleepy, not making any sense. 

 

Richie tells her he calls his  it his dick. 

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Yup. This is my dick, my dick is me.”

 

“Is that an impression of Seth?”

 

He grunts, maybe, sure, some other noncommittal sound of assent and she tells him quietly that she’s never seen a penis before. He asks if she wants to see his and she doesn’t know if he’s joking or not.

 

“I don’t think I ever want to see one,” she starts and then stops at the incredulous look on his face, realizes she’s lying, amends with, “Well, not yet.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“Is that weird?”

 

She needs assurance that it isn’t, from a member of the opposite sex.

 

“No.”   


“It’s just…” she considers her words carefully, finds them, speaks them, “like, it makes things very serious. To see them, a person, like that. I think.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t want to grow up.”

 

“That’s a pretty adult thing to say.”

 

She nods gravely and puts out her cigarette in a empty glass he’s using for an ashtray.

 

* * *

 

 

She’s at Vanessa’s, girls only, they watch a movie. One Kate could never catch at home. 

 

Ballerina rivals, it proves informative, it’s violent and weird and the masturbation scene ends on a horrifying note that makes Vanessa cackle. 

 

She’s fifteen and has only ever kissed one boy, once, and she lies awake sometimes, bored, wondering, waiting, and she can’t remember when someone knocked on the other side of the wall.

 

On her stomach she pushes her face into her pillow, pretends like she’s kissing someone and then less innocently biting someone, chest maybe. Vague fantasies and her hands meet between her legs and she just prods for awhile, bored, aimless, slips a hand down her shorts and her undies, pets at the short hairs on her mound, she’s been shaving, feels like there’s an expectancy of it, and she wants to know how for later, when she older and someone might expect it. She rubs, and holds her muscles tight, in her belly and her ass.

 

She still doesn’t know if her bed squeaks but it’s late and lately she’s been interested in really trying to find a way that she likes. She raises her feet and calves and it seems like it makes everything tighten up, all her muscles and her rubs against the bony ridges of her wrists, touches the little dab of almost-but not stickiness on the crotch of her panties with fingertips.

 

Her foot taps the wall and she stills, she doesn’t know how loud it was or if anyone is awake, she’s holding her breath and suddenly needs to breathe, she does and then holds it again, listens and then with a fingertip inside her underwear slipping up the seam of where she’s getting wet there’s a knock on the other side of the wall.

 

She huffs against her pillow, her feet drop back to the bed but she pushes one out from under the sheet and slides it to the wall, it’s a soft sound, and she isn’t even moving her hands or her hips but the liquid pull between her legs is a warm slosh from navel to knee at an answering tap.

 

For awhile she doesn’t move her foot at all, just thinks, waits, she wants to take her shorts off, and her panties, feel, for real, how wet she is on her palm and her fingers, she’s so warm. 

 

She taps her foot while she dips a small finger inside, bends her leg and puts her knee tight against the wall, the matte yellow paint of her bedroom wall is cool on her forehead.

 

And Richie raps.

 

“I’m trying to sleep, dick head.” Seth grumbles in the next room. Kate holds her breath, tries to listen, hears only her own blood whooshing.

 

“Go to sleep.”

 

“You’re gonna wake Kate. Do it in the bathroom.”

 

There’s a muttered reply she can’t hear, bed springs creaking and then their door opening and closing, soft shuffling steps in the hall, and for a moment she thinks her door is going to open, she’s out of bed, quick and not without a sound of it’s own. 

 

She tries to hear breathing, only hears her own despite who she knows is still in the hall, and she stands, waiting by her bed, walks slow and careful to her door which has never seemed further away and waits. Scared to reach out and put a hand on the door, press her ear against it. There’s a quiet sound, someone clearing their throat quietly as they swallow.

 

He moves, in the hall, and she opens the door, her hands and the back of her neck washing with heat and she sees him half-turned and then turning back. 

 

She doesn’t shut her door all the way but steps out enough and she thinks Richie is moving in to kiss her, maybe, might be, and her eyes shut, scared, excited, waiting, but his mouth moves dry and smooth against her ear.

 

“He’s not asleep.”

 

Seth. She pictures him standing, listening at the door like she was. It scares her too. In a different way. In a trouble sort of way. Because Seth smirks and taunts while Richie is quiet, always staring but not in a mean way. 

 

She pulls her head back, the nightlight in the bathroom give the hallway shadows and she tilts her head in the direction of the room her mom makes crafts in and sews the tears in their jeans and jackets. Richie is staring at her. She stares back until he nods and she walks down the hall, he does too, close and quiet, sneaking in and shutting the door, there’s another nightlight in the outlet under the sewing machine. 

 

It makes the shadows sharp and he blocks most of the light with his body.

 

She doesn’t know what to say, so she says nothing just stares down at their bare feet and then up at where her chin is level with his chest, he has freckles and a paler strip of skin under his hipbones than on his arms or belly. 

 

There’s a line of hair under his navel and she wants to touch it. 

 

But she doesn’t, she leans her shoulder back into the door.

 

And he’s not really a boy anymore, but she still feels like a girl. Thinks, maybe she might always.

 

When she shifts she can feel the slippery inside of her underwear moving. The leaky spill of it from where’s she so suddenly hot.

 

He touches her hip, thumb slipping under the band of her shorts and the elastic of her underwear, touches the bone and puts his lips against hers. 

 

She presses back with her mouth and he breathes against it, she does too, tongue peeking out to poke the smooth wet inside of his bottom lip and then his other hand against the doorframe and his body leaning in while she leans back her neck. 

 

His mouth tastes like a cigarette, but her lips are spit slick when he pulls back and she’s breathing hard, chest against his and she wonders if he can feel her nipples through her t-shirt.

 

“You weren’t kidding, were you?”

 

She doesn’t understand his question, he knocks knuckles against her chin and she shakes her head instantly, “no.” It’s a whisper back.

 

His expression doesn’t change.

 

“You were...too?”

 

She nods, his bare feet are on the outsides of hers and his thumb rubs a mark on her naked hip, it smoothes up a little, until it’s under her shirt and on her waist and she likes it. His big warm hand still and steady from the bottom of her ribs to the dip of her waist and his thumb on her belly button.

 

Her hand reaches, brushes against him bold and small, knuckles gauging  a part of him she shouldn’t have any real idea about, not specifically, not hopefully, certainly not. He feels hot there, like she feels hot.

 

He looks unsure, unsteady and trying to be very still. And she tries to find the resolve or the balls to tell him that she’s  so wet. It’s an unspoken mantra in her head that she never does say. They stand together, silent for so long she loses the spark that made the words start tumbling over, a twisty mobius strip that she doesn’t share with him. She tells him they should go to bed.

 

He nods.

 

And she leaves.

 

He stays.

 

In bed she touches herself, sure and searching, thinking about what they could have done, things she’s glad they really didn’t but thinks about anyway as she mouths sounds against her pillowcase until very very late. 

  
  


 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is all Seth and Richie POV scenes, there are some scenes towards the end that are going to overlap with the next chapter which will mostly be Kate POV because of stuff going on. The timeline in this chapter overlaps a little at the end.

* * *

Her uncle is a Texas Ranger. There’s a joke in there somewhere, a western up on the silver screen, the brothers: pastor and a ranger, the holy man and the gunslinger. And her Aunt is big red hair and a twangy voice that sounds younger than her face looks. Earl and Ramona, Seth thinks, yeah, that’s Texas. Stetsons and open carry on their hips. It’s sad when Aunt Mona gets cancer, they catch it late and Uncle Earl comes over for Thanksgiving a widower. There’s a couple from church, Freddie and Margaret who’s almost too pregnant to walk without duck steps.

 

When they go around the table it’s somber, things they are happy for.

 

Earl says ‘getting up in the morning without any pain,’ jaunty smile, half-false. Pain is more than arthritic knees and a sore back.

 

Seth’s thankful for the comfort of holidays, ones that go by with all the fixings, all the decorations, ways of measuring time without a stopwatch. But he just says he’s thankful for family, with a tone that passes the question down the table to his brother.

 

* * *

 

 

He misses cold winters. Snow. It’s brisk and next to him Kate is bundled, perpetually cold it seems like once winter comes. Seth and Vanessa are somewhere, but the night is noiseless and the lights are out. It’s almost Christmas and Kate wanted to see the twelve Stations of the Cross at the Shrine of Our Lady.

 

It’s solemn seeming, more so than when the festive green and red and white-blue lights are turning the night into sparkly holiday cheer, and they missed out on the operating hour carols and candy canes.

 

He doesn’t mind. He likes the feel of sleeping places. Closed for the season or after five or the places in town where Sunday means closed.

 

Jesus is larger than life size and Mary is crying as a Roman spears him in perfect stillness.

 

There’s a girlish shriek of glee and he knows it’s Vanessa, Seth is happy. They’re lurking somewhere with a flask of peach schnapps, sticky girl alcohol he hates it but Seth gets it and says it’s because he’s a gentlemen.

 

Richie always tells him to change his tampon.

 

Kate sighs into her crocheted scarf, blue like Mary’s shawled egg looking head.

 

They walk along, stop, look, silent.

 

They come to the empty tomb, and he tugs on her scarf, guiding the way up the hill and the stone stairs of the shrine. She follows, but at the gaping mouth of the fake but not fake rock tomb she stops. Stares like a kid at an open closest door that looks more sinister by nightlight.

 

“Come on,” and he feels a little like Seth when he says it. Bad. Not nice. But, with Kate, he’s not always nice, not quite mean, something else. He’d call the feeling naughty but that’s not right, too kiddish, not enough to paint the whole shade the right kind of black.

 

Darker. The color right before sinister and right past goading.

 

She walks and her boots are loud on the stone, and they stand in the dark in the shadows of the empty tomb.

 

In the dark she reaches for the back of his jacket and he asks if she’s afraid. There are things he doesn’t know about her, even after all their growing up, even after all the secrets there’s the simple difference of boy and girl between them and he knows she’s kept things from him.

 

“Do you know the feeling where you walk into a place and it’s like you just walked into something.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

And their voices don’t echo as much as he thinks they should.

 

“Like when you try to force magnets together but you have them facing the wrong way so they push apart instead. Like that. That’s how it feels.”

 

“Oh.”

 

She tries for a different comparison, “Like when you plug a set of headphones in and there’s that sound that isn’t a sound right before the real sound starts to come through.”

 

He nods, “The presence of something that isn’t really there, like that?”

 

In the doorway he can see her outline, the bulge of her scarf circling her neck and the pom-pom on her hat.

 

“Yeah, that’s it.”

 

There’s a word for what she means, he can’t think of what it is. Maybe not a word but the sentiment of one. He wishes he could find it for her. They sit on the steps outside the tomb, he smokes, she doesn’t, says she thinks she’s getting sick and he thinks he can feel the weight of the tomb behind him, against his spine. Against his side and arm she’s warm.

 

Seth and Vanessa swing up the path, giggle-buzzed. It’s makes Richie feel like him and Kate are the parents on a park bench watching kids play, talking about things children can’t articulate. It’s accurate enough, him and Kate are MENSA level but Seth and Vanessa might turn out to be GED twenty-somethings in a few more years.

 

Vanessa leans on Seth and his brother’s steps stumble.

 

Seth shouts loud and long like he’s Tarzan and Kate cringes, “He’s going to get us caught.”

 

Richie flicks away his cigarette. It erupts into sparks when it hits the stone steps, orange lace illumination and he reaches into his jacket, pulls out jangling keys.

 

“They’d get caught, we’d hide behind the tomb.”

 

She chuffs with silent laughter, shifts her legs, knocks the soles off her boots together and they give off a dull rubber sound, a ball bouncing in an unsatisfactory way before it rolls off.

 

After they drop Vanessa at home, after they get home, after Seth climbs the stairs with too much concentration to pass as sober, after her bedroom door has shut, and after he’s finished smoking a final before bed cigarette the word he didn’t have before floats close enough to catch. Lodestone.

 

It feels right, though the definition doesn’t, is opposite to the idea of pushing away. He goes to bed.

 

Their laundry ends up being done together, he needs a shirt for Sunday. Jennifer, who he has never called Momma like Kate or Ma like Seth started as a joke that turned into some soft and sweet habit, has a migraine.

 

Jacob’s at the church, preparing for the service. Kate is trying for a six minute mile, it’s the odd incongruent fact that she can do a ten-fifteen two mile that has her seething. Seth is watching Vanessa stretch against the chain link around the track in the interim between Kate’s practice and his playing taxi.

 

* * *

 

Richie is folding laundry.

 

Static has stuck socks to sweaters and a pair of Kate’s underwear to the inside of one of Seth’s shirts. A load of whites and Richie doesn’t think there’s anything prettier than white cotton panties on a girl.

 

He’d never steal them, because they aren’t his, and he wouldn’t be as crass to sniff them in the middle of the laundry room but he does set them on top of the dryer and looks at the softly fraying lace around the leg holes and the washed out pink bow at the top, set right in the middle.

 

And while he irons and starches his shirt for church service he thinks about how he’d have to omit some things from a confession if the church was catholic.

 

Lust-filled thoughts and incestuous ones, real and pseudo.

 

The kind of daydreams where he’d take a pair of her underwear and tuck them in his pocket, rub the lace between thumb and forefinger, but only after he’s pulled them down her legs, felt the wet sponginess of the crotch between the same fingers, see how the pink of the little bow matches up against what’s underneath.

 

He hangs his shirt on the rack over the dryer. False lavender scent of starch inside his nostrils, detergent, fabric softener and shoves everything else into a basket.

 

There’s a second-hand eroticism to seeing her things and he stops himself from disentangling them from the rest of the laundry and laying them out like paper dolls cut out on the dotted line wardrobe.

 

Kate is spring colors and cotton and bikini cuts. Soft shades Richie favors, subliminally or just trained to like through secondhand exposure.

 

Seth’s favorite colors are dark and at night his brother tells him that he doesn’t think he’s seen Vanessa wear the same underwear twice, vampy colored lace that comes wrapped in tissue paper and put into a bag every girl recognizes on sight.

 

Richie asked if it was boring, Seth didn’t know what he meant. The same old novelties compared to old favorites that can turn you into a pavlovian mutt. Seth called him a little old man and to stop thinking before his brain boiled over.

 

* * *

 

He’s got two party horns in his mouth, he blows and they unfurl, his lungs crackle against the sound, Kate laughs, Richie steps sideways and then into the party.

 

Vanessa’s hands are on his shoulders and Seth love New Year’s.

 

It’s not their house, or Vanessa’s, it’s Kyle’s and he only invited Kate. But Kate tells them it’s not as if anyone expects her without them.

 

Richie had snorted. Seth shrugged, let the idea foment, and called Vanessa.

 

He figures why not cock-block the kid trying to bone his little sister? That’s half the point of being a big brother, isn’t it? Richie didn’t answer. Vanessa just cooed, told him he was bad. But she said it in a nice way that had him kissing her on one still-semi swollen post wisdom tooth extraction cheek.

 

And Kate skims along the edges of the small groups, her party dress silver striped.

 

It’s basically youth group but with balloons until someone shows up with champagne, Kyle’s older cousins, and slowly, by degrees the good Christian youth find their way to inebriation by plastic flute-full and red solo cup swigs.

 

Vanessa and Kate dance, twin-like festive orphan annie hair, like ribbons curled with a scissor edge, unfurling and popping back while they move, and Richie plays beer pong, ignores a tall summertime blonde who has won the genetic lottery or bought stock in the push-up bra.

 

He waits, picks on pretzels and chips and watches kids younger than him dry hump through the loopholes of abstinence.

 

He claps his brother on the back as he passes, steals a beer yet un-balled and swerves around to find his girl. He pulls on a curl, not Vanessa’s it turns out, but Kate’s, it straightens and springs back. She rolls her eyes and he asks if he can pull Vanessa away. Kate waves a hand, smiles, steals his beer and he raises his eyebrows.

 

Again, her eyes roll and he knows it’s from hanging out with Richie too much.

 

And Richie is all smiles and big swings and misses at the ping pong ball.

 

“Think we’ll have to carry him?” Vanessa smiles up, mouth hot on his jaw and ear. She’s got bright pink lips and they probably look like Barbie doll identification stamps on his skin, but he doesn’t mind.

 

It’s not a regular party, not one where they usually find themselves, it’s a good kid party in a house with a cross hanging on a wall in every room.

 

Kids kiss and dance too close but he’s seventeen and so is Vanessa and they aren’t exactly living up to the good word. More like outlaw code. She likes the Quick and the Dead and Bugsy. He’s John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart before Casablanca. There’s a black sharpie heart around their initials in the girls locker room and he’s got one of her silver stud earrings in his lobe. He may be seventeen and a boy but he knows it’s: Meant. To. Be.

 

He asks if she wants to go back to her house.

 

New Year’s Eve, he croons, whispers the idea to bring in midnight half-naked and under her lavender bed sheets. They’ve done things, will do more, but time isn’t always opportune and he presses closer. Her parents are out in a hotel room for the night, bringing the romance back and Seth thinks it’s the best idea they’ve ever had. Vanessa called him gross.

 

He just smirked, told her even her parents had sex and made noises to mimic her mom. Now standing around with rowdy kids, most of them too young and too nice and too good making too much noise he’s starting to wish they never came.

 

She tosses her black curls, he wants to feel them between his fingers. She says no. That they have to stay, that she’s the ride. He nods. Tries hard not to be disappointed, perfect opportunities thrown away and he can’t figure out why, but the way she says things sounds like half-lies.

 

The party goes on. Kate is giggle-buzzed, pink cheeked, talking loud and excited about the Mexico missionary trip the church is doing to Kyle. Kyle, who sits close but not too close, and smiles and keeps the subject on the thing she wants instead of interjecting how pretty her hair is or how cute her dress looks or anything with any semblance of a game plan.

 

He sees Richie, surly, and the tall blonde from earlier trying to move close enough to his orbit that gravity takes over. But his brother doesn’t seem to be into the basic conversation of boy and girl and school and tip toeing around everything on everyone’s mind when there’s booze and no adult supervision.

 

His brother is walking away, glaring at everything.

 

And suddenly, Seth can’t find Vanessa and when he does he’s had another beer and being left alone in the middle of people having more fun than him has put him in a black mood. He puts his hands a little too far up Vanessa’s skirt, she calls him a pig and stalks off. The night is ending, Kate wants to go home, and Richie is quiet in the back of the car, eyes closed behind his glasses and forehead on the window.

 

Kate looks like she’s sleeping, wilting like her curls against her own side of the backseat. It’s two in the morning. Seth asks a question with an expletive to find out why Vanessa is ignoring him as she drives. She turns on the radio.

 

He wants to know why she’s being such a tease. She stops forcefully at the stop sign. From the side he sees her mouth pucker, her jaw pinch.

 

“You are such an asshole.”

 

He knows he can’t call her names, because it’s rude, because it’s not right.

 

Vanessa drops them off. He slams his door. Kate helps Richie navigate his way into the house and helps him take off his shoes.

 

He talks at his brother as he pulls on sweatpants. Richie mumbles things back, complains about his glasses hurting his face, and whines about his disorientation with pitch, yaw and roll. Not that Seth understand what he’s talking about.

 

“Are you going to contribute to the fucking conversation or complain about how much you drank?”

 

“And you wonder why she won’t fuck you.”

 

“Fuck face,” Seth tosses his socks at him. Richie brushes them away, leans up on an elbow, smiles, lazily, “She’s not going to fuck you while she’s on antibiotics.”

 

“What?”

 

“Fucks up birth control. Read a book.”

 

“How do you know she’s on antibiotics?”

 

“That’s the whole reason she was the designated driver. Wisdom teeth. You were there for the conversation. Which, since you have poor listening skills means you didn’t hear, and so, there you go.”

 

Richie flops back and Seth tries for nonchalance as he sits and falls back against his pillows, “There I go, what? You gonna slur another truth bomb at me? Go to sleep.” He curls onto his side and stares at the wall. He thinks he should text Vanessa.

 

Richie’s bed squeaks and there’s the heavy sound of something hitting the floor. When he turns Richie is shuffling on his knees over to his bed, he looks like he’s about to tip over, a hand outreached for balance that pushes out straight.

 

Seth rolls over all the way to his other side, rolls his eyes, about to ask what his brother is doing until Richie starts speaking first, “You haven’t gotten laid because you don’t listen.” And when Seth opens his mouth to speak, Richie’s fingers move drunkenly down his brow, catch on his mouth, “Shhhh.” Loud lisping whisper of sound and then quiet and serious, “Listen.”

 

He swats the hand away, Richie falls back on his ass.

 

“...You. Are. So drunk.”

 

“I need to vomit.” And he shuffle-jogs out.

 

Seth mumbles at the wall, “Go for it, champ.”

 

And from behind the half-closed door he can hear half-quiet tones of conversation. Kate soothing, like a mother. Richie whining. Seth smiles, reaches for his phone, texts a succinct ‘yo, imma dick’ to Vanessa. Waits for the screen to go florescent blue-white with a reply.

 

He hears Richie puking, Kate laughing.

 

Then her head poking in after a little knock, her curls are unfurling, her eyes are sleepy, glassy, still buzzed, she smiles softly, “which toothbrush is Richie’s?”

 

“Green.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“Hey, Kate.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“How pissed is Vanessa?”

 

“Um. I don’t know. What did you do?”

 

“You are no help.”

 

“I’m the one who’s going to brush Richie’s teeth for him so you can shut the fuck up.”

 

“Oh well well well.”

 

She flips him the bird, turning away from the door she’s been rocking back and forth against her shoulder.

 

Richie makes loud sounds of protest about something, probably the need for dental hygiene.

 

The phone on his nightstand lights up. Vanessa. No, automatic from the data company telling him about free data and limitless texting for $39.99/month.

 

He sighs, his crotch tingles with the need to piss.

 

The scene in the hall he walks into makes his brain bang out like a candle for a stark moment. Little Richie who hasn’t been little for a while looks like a caveman, his glasses are next to Kate’s crinkled tip-toes, her naked heels up off the ground and her mouth under Richie’s.

 

Little Richie’s got two big hands all over Katie-Kakes and Seth wants to wolf-whistle at them.

 

And it’s not until one of his brother’s hands pushes fingertips down the waistband of her shorts, arm flexing straight, hand searching, and the other is darting quick, up to cup a tit, that she coughs, head moving to the side, she coughs again and toothpaste flecks speck the breath she coughs out a second time.

 

He hears Richie say knock-knock, answers ‘Who’s there?’ and Kate sputters, Richie staggers, almost crushes his glasses.

 

Kate wipes toothpaste off her mouth and Richie grins a sloppy Colgate smile, mint green running down his chin and chest, “It looks like you two sucked off the tooth fairy together, you gonna rinse or can I piss?”

 

While Kate swishes and spits, Seth pees, door open, Richie sitting against the wall in the hall. Kate looking pointedly at her own reflection.

 

As he leaves, Richie points out he hasn’t washed his hands, says he should always wash his hands, since he has a girlfriend he fingerbangs all the time.

 

Carefully he skirts around Kate, their bare feet stepping on each other as she puts her toothbrush away and he sings happy birthday while washing his hands.

 

He thinks she’s gone when he looks at Richie and asks if he takes his own advice.

 

Kate swings back in, and without words, picks up his red toothbrush and drops it into the unflushed toilet bowl. Richie dissolves into giggles, catches her ankles as she walks passed into her room, Seth can see in the mirror his hand run up to the back of her knee.

 

She pushes him over with her foot once he’s let go.

 

In bed, at four in the morning, he’s unable to sleep from sudden sour stomach nausea and no text from Vanessa and Richie’s intermittent waking from sleep to puke into a trash can lined with a plastic bag from the grocery store, Seth reasons it must be the booze. Root of all evils. His head hurts and he doesn’t sleep well.

 

* * *

 

Vanessa gets Kate in on powder-puff football, they make pink jerseys in the kitchen, glitter and stencil letters, Vanessa’s breasts push out of a bright citron sports bra from the ripped V of the collar, Seth swallows lemonade and whispers in her ear as he goes by that she look _lush_.

 

Vanessa clicks her teeth, snarls at him, playful, back in her good graces he’s giddy and horny in equal measures, he watches her with two hands at Kate’s jersey pull until it’s ripped too.

 

“I can see your dirty pillows, Kate.”

 

She scowls. Vanessa reaches out, pokes at Kate’s chest. Kate pulls back, hands up and defensive, “Knock it off.”

 

Vanessa smiles, “They are decorative pillows. Not dirty ones.”

 

Seth swings up to sit on the counter, sips his lemonade, grins slow and wolfish back at Vanessa, “Isn’t the point of decorative pillows that you see them?”

 

Kate huffs, throws a handle of glitter in his direction.

 

Vanessa too.

 

As Kate leaves he shouts, “Baby’s first boobs,” after her.

 

At night he talks about girls with Richie, and all their parts. Sometimes he talks about Vanessa, vaguely, because he tries not to get into specifics. Richie doesn’t ask for details anyway so Seth doesn’t feel like he’s keeping secrets.

 

Sometimes they talk about Kate. Seth wonders out loud if she’s a virgin, Richie says she is, but Seth mentions Kyle from church and Richie says Kate doesn’t like boys like Kyle.

 

Seth will grin, wide and bright white at his brother.

 

“Yeah…,”

 

“What?”

 

“Kate.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

He wiggles his fingers indecently. Makes a letter V, flicks his tongue between his fingers.

 

“No.”

 

“I’m not an idiot.”

 

“Well, you’re not a genius, Seth.”

 

“Well, Richie, What the fuck does that make you?”

 

“I’m a fucking prodigy.”

 

“Okay, prodigy. You really think a girl goes sixteen, seventeen years without a boy getting their fingers wet because of them?”

 

“Kate’s not like that.”

 

“You’re only saying that because you’re in love with her little tits.”

 

“Smaller breasts are more sensitive. That’s science.”

 

“That’s good cause Kate’s only got a mouthful anyway.”

 

Richie looks distinctly more irritated than he did at the start of the conversation.

 

A day later they sit in the stands during the homecoming pep rally pre-game, and then in pink polos they cheer on their girls. Kate tackles Vanessa and Vanessa grabs her around the legs in retaliation, they go down and come off the field with both their flags pulled and grass stains on their asses, bloodied knees and bruised shins.

 

In the glass of a cased bulletin board, Kate is examining a bruise riding low under her clavicle. Seth sneaks up and asks if he should get Vanessa to kiss better what her elbow did. Kate rolls her eyes.

 

“Did you know little boobs are more sensitive than big boobs?”

 

“That’s a gem, Seth. Really. That must explain why you are so emotionally inept, you are just a really big boob.”

 

“Wonder if that’s how they came up with that.”

 

“Ask Richie.”

 

“Yeah, Richie knows everything.”

 

And Richie comes up to them, “Not everything, but lots of things.”

 

* * *

 

 

They all go camping.

 

They go to the range and shoot clay pigeons. Jennifer doesn’t like guns, but Jacob grew up on a healthy Texas diet, he tells his wife she should be glad he doesn’t go around with a Stetson like his brother.

 

He’s not a bad shot, none of them are, but the shotgun kickback has Kate clocking out early, rubbing Bengay on her sore shoulder a few hours later.

 

Camping is alright but for the most part Seth would rather sleep in the car.

 

His tent is over a root it’s also full of eight-legged friends, and Seth can’t stand spiders, he sleeps next to the fire pit.

 

He hears the zip on one of the other two go up, feet on leaves, night sounds.

 

It’s Kate.

 

He comes out to sit with her and his brother.

 

“It’s fucking cold as _balls_ out here.”

 

“Sleep in the tent stupid.” Kate tucks up her knees, feet in big blue woolen socks with leaves stuck to the bottoms, her shorts curl up high on her thighs and she pushes her bare legs up against her chest, tight under her big brown-beige sweater. One of Richie’s, the socks are Seth.

 

“Spiders.”

 

“We can switch. Mine doesn’t have spiders.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Let’s just push them together.”

 

They reorganize their sleeping bags, unzip them into squares and sleep on the spiderless side and bundle close but not too close.

 

Seth curls on his side, Richie’s side against his spine and Kate is curled up under his brother’s arm. It’s nice, the three of them, once he squirms his hip off of a tree root under the tent floor and forgets that there are things living in the corners with eight legs and millions of eyes.

 

He dozes.

 

Wakes almost fully to quiet tones and soft rustling, a girlish sigh and gruff mumble. He feels the roof wool of Kate’s sock graze the back of his knee, he shifts, stuck on how a foot away Kate’s got her leg thrown over Richie.

 

There’s heavy heat curling through his groin, there are nighttime sounds and breathing that’s not quite heavy, sleeping bags and the distinctive scritch sound of them against the tent floor and Seth is getting hard.

 

He’s stuck in the groggy state of half-awake and horny and he thinks about the two people under the blankets with him, moving furtive and quiet and they might not be awake but Seth doesn’t turn his head to check.

 

Richie puts his back to him, and Seth wonder’s if Kate’s pulled up against his brother’s chest. Wonders if Richie’s got hands sneaking under her sweater. Wonders if Kate had been pressing herself against Richie’s hip, while asleep or while awake. If it’s innocent sleep-filled fumbling or sneaky and sure groping while they think he’s asleep.

 

Seth’s got a hand down his sweatpants, resting on the inside of his thigh, familiar blood thrum of an erection starting to get serious.

 

He wonders if his brother has been fucking their sister. Because by now, that’s what she is, their sister. But maybe it’s truer to say they’re her brothers since she was there first. He can’t decide if one way makes it wrong and the other right or if it’s the same either way.

 

He brushing his dick with a swipe of his thumb and wonders if Richie’s sneaking hands, soft and slow up her sweater, right now, has her holding her breath when one holds a tiny tit and the other moves down the front of her shorts. Wonders if Kate’s wool socks are rubbing back and forth on Richie’s legs.

 

He waits for sounds to bleed out, hears nothing like a moan or a whispered expletive, but that doesn’t mean anything. Richie could be pressing the heat of his dick against the small of Kate’s back, weepy tip leaving a wet kiss on the dimples over her ass.

 

His brother’s fingers could be pushing against where no one’s touched her before, not even herself, maybe. Kate could be having her first orgasm and Seth can’t sleep with his dick suddenly so hard.

 

Richie might be slipping fingers under the elastic of her underwear and Kate might be biting her arm to keep quiet when they press her open, slip up and down her slit, thumb rubbing circles on her clit. Richie would do it slowly, he thinks.

 

Seth ruts up against his palm, thinks about Richie’s fingers in Kate’s mouth, to help her keep quiet, to make them wet before they slip inside of her.

 

Next to him there’s an exhale, an answering sound or the byproduct of dreams.

 

And he wonders if Richie shifting next to him is to get his sweats down low enough and his dick out, if he’s working Kate’s shorts down to her knees.

 

If in the dark, Kate’s pressing hips and ass back for him, if Richie’s got her quiet and compliant and scared of making a sound.

 

And there’s a hard jolt through him, instant hot wash of more potent and persistent arousal in Seth, Kate who wants to fuck Richie in a tent next to their sleeping brother or Kate who Richie’s working up, coaxing in a more wrong way. And Seth can believe that his brother is that way too.

 

Suddenly there are fantasies of Kate who is completely aware and has been fucking Richie in secret or Kate who’s about to lose her virginity in the midst of seventy percent ‘no’ and thirty percent ‘fuck yes’.

 

Seth’s fingers are getting slick, thick line of wet slipping out of him, he’s going to cum soon.

 

And he thinks of Richie’s dick, stretching her open, just the tip, like a lollipop popped between a girl’s pouty kissy face mouth. Thinks about a hand over her mouth, thinks about her eyes wide open, lips slick and cheeks pink, Richie pushing in, slow, hot, thick and Kate squirming, socks and feet rubbing on Richie’s calves, thighs trying to open like butterfly wings.

 

The steady in-out timed to night sounds and rustlings, wind and animals moving outside so no one hears them.

 

He thinks about Richie’s lips mushing against the back of her neck, leaving marks under the fall of her hair, her nails leaving crescent moons on his forearm, holding her in place while he fucks her like a rotten creep in the tent, telling her not to make a sound.

 

Seth doesn’t want to think about Richie like that, but it’s hot. The fantasy world of being bad, doing things that no one can tell you not to. He thinks about Kate feeling for the first time someone’s cum inside of her, full of it, thinks of Richie’s fingers sliding through his mess to finish her off, three fingers to take his place, thinks of how filthy their fucking would sound, how impossible and loud it would be for them to catch their breath. How they’d bleat or bleed sounds, groan or moan the other’s name.

 

Seth comes against the fleecy inside of his sweatpants, the image of Kate and Richie kaleidoscoping into strange vague naked limbs and tongues and it’s Richie under the blankets with his mouth between Kate’s legs, or then Vanessa and Kate between each other’s legs and then it’s him and Vanessa and Kate, and then just him and Richie.

 

As he comes down there’s Richie’s gruff tones telling him not to move, and a hand slapping the sleeping bagged humped around his shoulders.

 

Richie telling him it was a spider and Seth too fucked out to care.

 

He turns his head. Catches Richie’s sleepy grin and hand gesture of jacking off. Kate is asleep. On her back, one arm elbow out above her head, her other hand flat on the strip of bare navel from where her sweater has risen. One leg kicked out and mouth open, breathing loud and she’s asleep and Richie’s been awake the entire fucking time.

 

Seth wipes a dirty hand over his throat, Richie grimaces then smashes dead spider onto his bicep and rubs it in. Seth makes loud protesting sounds, kicks at Richie under the blankets, Richie kicks back. Kate shifts in her sleep, rolling onto her stomach telling them to go to sleep.

 

Her arms stretching to cover his brother’s collar and after they’ve fallen asleep and after Seth’s stolen a greedy portion of sleeping bag from them both Richie’s pulled her over him, back under the blankets. Seth wakes up, sees them chest to chest, Richie’s big hand up the back of her sweater, her thighs pillowing his hips from above and her sleeping open mouth leaving wet circles on his throat.

 

He nudges them awake. Better they have to get up than get caught dry humping in their sleep by Pastor Dad.

 

Kate makes her exit, Seth teases Richie about his morning wood. Wonders, secretly, what Kate thinks of it. Richie calls him an unkind word and beats off fast and efficient with no loud vocals.

 

“At least try to pretend you’re having a good time.”

 

Richie flips him the bird.

 

* * *

 

 

She wants to get out of the house, he’s got his junior license, they take her daddy’s car and she puts her feet on the dash.

 

It’s Wednesday which means it’s Sunday, or _Sundae-y_ , according to the signs in the ice cream place.

 

He takes her there.

 

She gives him a sideways look, raised eyebrow when the girl behind the counter smiles at him. Her name’s Melissa, she works Monday, Wednesday, Friday and he comes for ice cream on Wednesday.

 

She sits behind him in U.S. history, and across the room from Kate in A.P. English composition. Sometimes he’s the last person to come in on a Wednesday night, and Melissa sits with him on the bench outside the store windows and they eat ice cream together.

 

On New Year’s she kissed him but Kate doesn’t know that. And more recently than that, after school, working on a project for class in the library, she kissed him again, more came afterwards at her house a few blocks away from his.

 

Melissa’s practical, smart, pretty, and she likes him. But, Melissa likes boys who aren’t him too. Richie understands, girls aren’t all nail polish and gossip, pink glossy smiles and perfume that smells like the lingerie store in the mall.

 

He lost his virginity while her parents were at work, came quick, too quick, she’d been a good sport about it, giggled. Made him laugh about it too. She’d looked at the clock and made a face of disappointment, said he could give her an I.O.U.

 

He’d been surprised how easy it was, how simple, nice. Melissa isn’t easy, no rumors about her blowing someone in a guestroom at a party or critique on how she dresses at school. She’s discreet and always smiling and Richie likes that. Long blonde hair and tan freckles all over the tops of her nose and cheeks. The biggest tits he’s ever seen on a girl who doesn’t crack one-twenty on the scale. He likes that she’s tall enough that he doesn’t need to do more than tilt his neck to kiss her.

 

“Hey, Kate.” She grins.

 

“Hey, Mel.”

 

“So, old man sundae and what else?”

 

“A what?” Kate laughs, looks at him for an answer.

 

“Vanilla soft serve and black cherries, old man sundae.”

 

Kate’s nose crinkles, “Too sweet, hot fudge sundae with peanuts and peanut butter.”

 

“Little or a lot?”

 

“A lot.”

 

“You know how they stuff dog toys with peanut butter? That much.”

 

“Jerk.”

 

Richie grins, stares at the back of Melissa’s head while she makes their sundaes, “Your braid’s crooked.”

 

“Thanks, Vidal Sassoon.”

 

When Kate’s looking at cakes, back turned to the counter, Melissa forks off a sliding cherry from his sundae and pops it past her lips. Smirks dirty at him. He rolls his eyes and smiles. Look down at his feet, “You are no fun, Richard.” She flicks a shelled peanut halve at him from the counter.

 

She never calls him Richie, just like he never calls her Mel.

 

She slides their ice cream cups across the top of the metal counter and she smirks at him like he smirks at her in the hall when another boy is talking to her, she’s somewhere on the spectrum between Kate and Vanessa. And she’s going to be graduating. Richie thinks he might miss her more than he misses her, it’s a strange feeling, under his sternum, achy flutter tumbling around.

 

It makes him smile a little, put his hands in his pockets.

 

She gives them a jaunty salute as they leave.

 

Kate, looking thoughtful in the passenger seat scrapes at the paper bottom of her ice cream cup, turns to look out the window, lets out a soft sigh.

 

“What?”

 

For a moment he expects her to turn, inexplicably with a smile like Seth’s and say something with a smirk, secret girl vibes like a radio transmission. But, instead there’s a grim little pull of her mouth, a squiggle.

 

“Nothing, just...I don’t know. She looks happy, that’s good.”

 

“You expect her to not look happy?”

 

“Well...no, but, you know her brother died right? Like, I don’t know,” she searches, eyes looking forward, “last year, year before. It was at school.”

 

“You mean the kid who died at a football game?”

 

“Yeah, I think it was during a practice.”

 

“I didn’t know it was her brother.”

 

“I think they were twins.”

 

Kate doesn’t say anything else. He sees Melissa in school, thinking about things he didn’t know before, looking closer to see signs he might have missed, signs that say she’s lost a sibling. He can’t see any.

 

But later, after school, her parents gone, they stand in her living room and he sees the pictures on the walls and the mantel and later in her room there’s another on her desk. Tall and blonde like her, glasses in black frames and Richie, for the first time wonders if she loved her brother. Richie wonders if she likes him because he might remind her of him.

 

Knows he’s not the only person in the world to cross some moral stigma line but he doesn’t ask, doesn’t say anything.

 

Melissa tells him, not with any planning but when she checks the mail and finds scholarship paperwork for her dead brother in with the cable bill and her cosmetic subscription box. He watches like a scientist with a specimen as her face changes, no smile, cheeks losing color and her teeth biting into her bottom lip in a way he hasn’t seen.

 

It’s the first time he’s seen grief up close, she doesn’t cry but she looks like she can’t remember what she was doing before, blank suddenly. And slowly, in increments, she comes back, smiles in a way that isn’t real, “Sorry, it still fucks me up.”

 

He nods, “Yeah.”

 

She waves the mail.

 

“He got into the school I wanted to go to, thought about cutting my hair and lifting weights, sneak in as him.”

 

“Those might give you away.” He points at her chest and her mouth pulls at the corner.

 

He doesn’t know how best to comfort a girl, not in any real emotional way, he gives her two orgasms, before and after his own, it’s slow and unhurried and her parents are in the middle of peak season at the ice cream place so it’s easier for him without the worry of someone catching them. It’s something he learned from Seth, through secondhand information about Vanessa and the general idea that sublimation helps people deal with shit.

 

“You read a lot.” He’s mouthing at her nipple, chest dewy with sweat and tan like she lays out topless in the sun, there are freckles like sand clots all over her torso, like the underbelly of a fawn.

 

She looks at her bookcases.

 

“Lots of textbooks, I get them from the thrift section at the library. I only read certain parts.”

 

“What parts?”

 

“Lifespan psychology, mostly kids and teenagers, sex obviously, abnormal behavior.”

 

“That what you’re going to school for?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Do you think I’m abnormal?”

 

She makes a loud sound, hmmms in a way he can feel through her skin. “You? You’re pathological.”

 

He nods, pushes his mouth around her breast, as much as he can until she squirms and sighs, “Can’t believe I took your virginity.”

 

“I’m a quick learner.”

 

“You’re alright, I don’t think you can stand being anything except exceptional.”

 

“That your professional opinion? Aren’t you a little young to be a doctor already?”

 

“You’re going to need to practice, practice, practice if you ever want to go to the Olympics.”

 

“I think my brother was watching a porno where that was the plot.”

 

There both too fucked out and lethargic for another bout, it’s the last time he sees her that way before graduation. He borrows some of her books, pages tabbed and highlighted, she says he can keep them. Seth reads them too, quotes off statistics relating to sibling rivalry and masturbation and incest.

 

He thinks Seth goes through some sort of heteronormative crisis, no homo shit, in cycles like a girl’s period every month. Richie tries to explain with short answers, Kinsey scale and formative years but Seth thinks that translates to weight measurement and something to do with puberty.

 

Across the room Seth’s thumbing through a book, says suddenly, as Richie is stretched out, trying to sleep through the heat of noon, “Did you know thirteen percent of siblings have sex with each other at some point?”

 

He’s off a little by the breakdown of the numbers but Richie’s too tired to elucidate the subject of sudden conversation, “Yup.”

 

Seth is making a face at him, his lack of enthusiasm or mitigating his sometimes guilt over the things they sometimes do when they’re lonely or horny or bored.

 

“Here’s a part for you: ‘Often the incest begins as a kind of teasing, playful activity with prolonged kissing, wrestling and surreptitious genital touching. Over time, these activities can develop into overt genital touching, without any physical force being used’ the end.”

 

Richie flips his pillow to the cool side, mumbles something, asking what the point is.

 

“…nothing. No point. None. At. All.”

 

Seth smirks, Richie sits up, full attention given to the conversation, he’s very ready to participate, if just to knock Seth down a single smug peg.

 

“Does it bother you more that I don’t think of Kate as my sister like you do or because you think I do and that means I won’t put your dick in my mouth?”

 

“…”

 

“Because, she’s not my sister. Or yours. And you get jealous and whine when your dick is not the topic of discussion or the top of the to do list.”

 

“So says Richard the Monk.”

 

“Not a virgin, Seth.”

 

“Blowjobs don’t count.”

 

“Not from you they don’t.”

 

“Who?”

 

“Not Kate, that’s what you’re worried about right?”

 

“No, you two do whatever you want.”

 

“Wasn’t her.”

 

“Okay.”

 

Richie lies back down to sleep. Seth makes irritated sounds from across the room.

 

“Are you going to tell me, or not?”

 

He doesn’t and Seth is pissy about it for the rest of the day.

 

* * *

 

Kate’s dress is petal pink, long pleats, chiffon and satin, girlish. Seth forgets that it’s called sheath style and when Vanessa asks he says it’s like a condom. Richie corrects him. The girls go out and try to find matches shoes, bags, they decide what flowers they want for their corsages and pick out pictures for how they want their hair.

 

Vanessa and Seth are graduating.

 

They’ve got a beach house rented with three other couples. Kate is going with a group, a group with Kyle. Richie is staying home. Prom, with no promise of booze and shitty music, is not something he considers a night worth remembering.

 

Kate corsage is in the fridge next to Vanessa’s. Three days before prom.

 

And then there’s a phone call from Kate’s aunt about her dad and her mom and Richie tells Seth to go get her.

 

Seth and Vanessa go to prom.

 

Kate puts her dress in her closet and spends the night on the couch, next to him, trying not to cry.

 

She does.

 

Her mom’s dead and Richie wishes he felt worse. But he hasn’t had a mom for almost as long as he’s been alive, wasn’t really sure how to suddenly have one, and now Jennifer’s dead and Kate’s like him. Dead mom, dad that’s going to be useless in the aftermath. For a while, at least.

 

* * *

 

She turns seventeen fifteen days after the funeral.

 

They have cake and candles in the dim, unlit kitchen in midafternoon. It’s quiet and everyone is there. Earl, Freddie, Margaret, baby Billie, her dead mother’s sister. Biggest birthday party in a while, afterwards Freddie and Margaret take them to the fair, the one they advertise every year on the radio with the same jingle they’ve used for a decade, the one they find themselves humming sometimes while they drive once school starts its final round of homework and state testing.

 

The three of them walk around, sharing pink and blue cotton candy from a bag, sticky fingered and not knowing what to say. At least, he doesn’t know what to say, feeling like he should. Kate is just silent. Richie might have nothing to say.

 

The only thing he knows to do is hug a girl when she cries and according to Lifetime movies to make sure you don’t leave them alone in case they get depressed and try to ride the Ferris wheel alone just so they jump off of it.

 

He’s scared.

 

He doesn’t like silence.

 

Doesn’t like coming home to a house where the lights are off inside. It reminds him of when he was a kid and how he knew if the lights were off then his dad was sleeping off a half-bottle of nine dollar rum on the couch and it was safer to sleep in the backyard on the porch.

 

They find Margaret and Billie post diaper change in the car near the bumper cars and walk together until they find Freddie minus boots and hat on the mechanical bull.

 

They all take a turn.

 

He goes ass over head in about three second. Richie bounces off with a not much better time and messed up hair, pomade unstuck and stumbling around until Kate gives him back his glasses.

 

When she gets up, bare feet tight against the underneath of the fake animal contraption, he hoots and claps at her fourteen seconds, hair whipping and chest pressed out, Richie is standing next to him, mouth breathing, Seth nudges him back to composure. Wonders, not for the first time, or the fiftieth if they’ve done things they’d have to confess if they were Catholic.

 

He leans close, mutters with half his mouth that Jesus is watching. Richie scowls, walks forward with a dirty look directed back at him and hands Kate her sandals.

 

“Ride a lot cowgirl?”

 

Her blush comes after the confusion eases and her cheeks go a furious red, she coughs, steals his tickets from his pocket and drags Richie towards the bumper cars. Seth follows, leans over the fence and snaps pictures for Margaret on a disposable camera.

 

Things feel normal.

 

At night he pretends not to notice Richie sneak out of bed, pretends not to hear Kate’s bed squeaking as someone else climbs in, he pretends to be asleep like he pretends to not hear Kate crying all the time, or the way it stops when Richie climbs under her covers.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait

She’s at practice, stretching out, dreading three rounds of hurdles and sprints for warm-ups. With her forehead pressed to her knee she can feel a pull on her hamstring that’s asking to be rolled out.

 

Vanessa pulls on her ponytail.

 

“Seth’s here.”

 

And he is, gesturing at them from a quarter mile down the track at the edge of the chain link. Vanessa hop-pops up and sprints. Kate doesn’t lift her head to watch them kiss-kiss-kiss until a whistle blows for practice to start. She wonders if he came for that alone or because Richie made him her ride.

 

Before she’s done stretching Vanessa’s back and breathing hard, palm on her chest.

 

“You gotta go,” there’s the pause for a necessary hard inhale, “car accident.”

 

She’s gone, running and then in the car and Seth drives silently after he tells her what’s going on, red puffy faced under the eyes and sniffling to stop snot from running.

 

She holds it in until the waiting room.

 

She thought it was Richie, felt her abdomen fall out like a trap door, viscera weightless, Seth tells her it’s her parents and her chest hurts, like too tight ace bandages, and she can’t decide which felt worse.

 

And she prays, prays, bargains and makes deals in her head. A nurse tells her that her dad is sedated in the ICU, breathing on his own, doing good, looks good.

 

Her mother must be in the ER, she’s told.

 

The nurse isn’t sure. Someone will come out to talk to them soon.

 

And her mother is dead and she just nods. Cries, cries, cries. Tries to find gratefulness somewhere for her father, and she does, feels sick, wonders what God would say.

* * *

 

 

Richie finds her mother’s pills, cleans it all up

 

There’s a call about a car accident, Uncle Earl heard it on the scanner. Home alone, Richie calls Seth and wanders the house, aimless, clear headed with empty unspecific thoughts.

 

There are carelessly dropped pills on the carpet. He picks them up with careful fingertips, they tink into the empty orange bottle that he puts back in the medicine cabinet. Thinks, without real resentment that there’s some comparison between the solace of doctor prescribed poison in its trademarked plastic and a baby rattle. The mirror clicks shut on the evidence he’s smart enough to recognize as evidence.

 

At the hospital a day later Jacob says it was a deer. Richie leans down, close to his pillow, once everyone else has left, tells him he cleaned up at the house.

 

Jacob nods, Richie leaves and lets him cry without someone trying to make him feel better. Jennifer’s dead, there’s nothing anyone can do to make him feel better.

 

And Richie knows some people need grief to serve as penance.

* * *

 

 

Jennifer’s sister comes to keep house, she tucks them in to bed, grocery shops so they don’t starve, and sorts the socks. Earl keeps Jacob out of sight, only half-sober but high functioning, Kate cries, Seth is silent, and he tries to keep his mind on every ball in the air.

 

He remembers waiting everything out on the stone bench next to Seth, cigarette split between them, he didn’t tell him then about the pills, but he thought about it.

 

He thought of Kate in one of the boxy rooms somewhere on the second floor, a row of yellow squares from the outside, lots of open curtains and sick people in hospital beds, he’s always been unsettled by open curtains and people living their lives like scenes on stage.

 

It’s disgusting he thinks.

 

Seth was crying.

* * *

 

 

She was standing in the kitchen, the three of them home, she’d gotten up first and Seth was still sleeping. She poured water for tea and shifted her weight from leg to leg, skated around the kitchen on her socks, slid all the way to the fridge then back to the microwave, he’d watched her crouch down to peer at her reflection in the oven’s glass window.

 

What people do when their alone, while they wait for something, the toaster spring shot her waffles and she stood back up. The mug is her mother’s.

 

It says MOM on it, he sees it from the couch, in the dark of the unlit living room during that predawn hour, she didn’t know he’d fallen asleep on the couch or that she’d woken him up.

 

She’d pushed the mug closer and closer to the counter edge, concentrating on really seeing it, pushing it. He gets it, the symbolic shit people do when someone dies to get on with grief, but it was Kate and she drank her tea and ate her waffles and put the MOM mug in the sink.

 

The dish board was full, dry dinner plates, she’d sat up on the counter, head on her knees, head turned to watch the backyard sunrise, she put a foot out, swept it along, the dishes shatter apart, pieces all across the kitchen.

 

She sees him then.

 

Seth finds them cleaning the mess.

* * *

 

 

There are final papers to sign, the second day of her mother’s wake, Uncle Earl tries to tell her father it doesn’t matter, not right then. He tries to keep her father focused but, Kate thinks, that maybe what he needs is the distraction of keeping appointments.

 

If he runs on fumes he’ll be too tired to crack the seal on a new bottle of Seagrams 7 and the cheap plastic bottle won’t be hidden somewhere in the bottom of the recycling.

 

She’s sitting on the staircase, come home to eat and shower and wash her only black dress after wearing it two days in a row, she’s waiting for the dryer timer to go off. Her stockings are hanging over the towel rail, they won’t be dry in time.

 

It feels wrong to go to stand next to her momma in the funeral parlor without stockings. She doesn’t think it’s proper etiquette. Seth said it didn’t matter, Richie looked like he didn’t have the emotional distance to tell her she’s right and not feel bad about being truthful like usual.

 

She’s listening to her father and uncle argue in the kitchen without words, the angry cadence of everyday sounds, the fridge opening and all the glass condiments rattling hard, the cabinets banging shut, the coffee pot being shoved roughly into place, silverware clinking furiously against coffee mugs.

 

“We’re going to bury my wife as a family, a real one.”

 

Her father is going to the bank, to the notary, and Uncle Earl is trying to convince him that a signature and a stamp on a piece of paper doesn’t make anything official. He’s right, but he’s wrong too.

 

It had been going on for weeks, her parents trying and never actually making it to the bank before it closed or forgetting to call the person they wanted to witness, or the furious preparations for her and Seth going to prom taking up all the time afterschool and on the weekends. It means something to her dad, that’s all.

 

They argue for so long that the bank will be closed by the time they get there and Uncle Earl can’t make his tone sound anything other than firmly pleased.

 

“The business place that does taxes has a notary, they don’t close until six,” she says after they ignore the way she’s come into the room. She pours coffee, impossibly tired and wrung out she offers to drive her dad there.

 

Uncle Earl folds and tells her he’ll take her dad. She puts the keys on the table and gets her dad his jacket. She watched them back out of the driveway, pull away and keeps watching until the dryer goes off.

* * *

 

 

They sit up through the night, she has a sore throat and a chest cold that makes it hurt to breath, it didn’t quite rain but it misted all through the service, it was too cold for her sweater to help.

 

Seth put a blanket over her from behind the couch and Richie sits at her feet at the other side of the couch, she’s curled up breathing vapor rub but her throat still feels like she’s swallowed glass.

 

Seth says he needs to go walk for a while.

 

He’s going to see Vanessa but doesn’t want her to think he’s leaving them because he doesn’t love them or feel bad about what’s happening, he just needs something to comfort him and he doesn’t want to share his grief.

 

Her father is with Earl, they stayed at the cemetery, now she doesn’t know what they’re doing.

 

Richie says something uncharacteristic, a lie to make her not worry, not cry. It’s nice but it’s also stupid.

 

“When you’re an adult you’re expected to be able to grieve on your own, he won’t be back tonight. I know that.” She tells him. She sits up and he makes space. She lies on him, selfish and sick and not caring much if he catching it.

 

When she wakes up Seth is pushing at them both, long legs stretched over theirs at the other end of the couch. She can smell her breath and Richie’s sweat burning through the last of his deodorant from the day before, Seth smells like weed and something intimate he’s done with Vanessa.

* * *

 

 

Summer has come and he takes her to the track at night, after ice cream. She takes her sneakers from the backseat and feels a boldness that comes only from not-dark-yet summertime nights in empty places that any other time are never so still.

 

She’s wearing a dress but boldness makes that something flavoring the whole feeling she’s had all night. He watches, standing in the middle of the track behind her, cigarette pulled out of his mouth and hanging by his side, other hand raised like the starting gun and he says bang quietly.

 

She clears the jump, bounces once, not ever as much as she expects on the pad. Her skirt flipped up and decidedly simple underwear, they have little blue stars on them.

 

When Richie comes over to stare down at her it makes her guts hot. He doesn’t say anything, just grins, snorts softly, all smoke and let’s his eyebrows stay where he’s raised them for a few seconds. She doesn't think about her momma, she doesn't feel sad.

* * *

 

 

Seth finds her sitting in the center of a circle of her mom’s things, dresses being packed for the goodwill, all Sunday best, pant suits already boxed away for her aunt who wanted them. There’s a baby book from her on first year of life, pictures of her being brought home.

 

There’s an old White Diamonds gift set, soft curlers, costume jewelry, and yarn balls.

 

She’s got her knees pulled up and her head hanging between them.

 

Seth steps over the outer ring of her mother’s life and puts a hand on her back, makes circles with his palm over her shoulders and tucks her under his arm, she’s quiet there’s no crying. He knows it’s because she won’t cry unless she feels like no one’s going to hold it against her, unless she knows the people around won’t say anything.

 

Seth can’t not say shit, it doesn’t help her it just makes him feel more able to help.

 

Kate hugs him and he carries boxes of ceramic figurines downstairs. She smiles and says thank you but Seth feels her holding back words.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woah, another update, I'm moving and shaking here. Only two more chapters left.

The drive down is devoid of Christian rock and afternoon hymns, and Kate is thankful she’s decided to ride with Seth and Vanessa instead of the bus with the rest of the humanitarian church effort with its surplus of plastic rosaries and miniature bibles.

 

Vanessa packed her bag for her, begged, whined, guilted her into going and as they drive over the border she’s grateful for that too. It's a different sort of guilt instead of the one she’s been weighted with since the funeral.

 

But, Kate doesn’t tell her or Seth that Richie promised to look after her dad, make sure he didn’t drink too much while they’re away. He told her he was used to watering down booze and cleaning up puke and she wasn’t sure if she was relieved or sad after he said it.

 

Richie doesn’t say things to garner pity, but she’s been raised to pray for people, the dichotomy is at the core of both of them and every social transaction they share.

 

At a rest stop, while Seth pumps gas, Vanessa twists around in the front seat and spiders fingers up her bare knee. Vanessa pinches to get her attention.

 

Kate rubs the red spot, ouches out loud and Vanessa grins, “Soooo…”

 

“What?”

 

“When we get to the hotel, since you love me and since Seth thinks you are the best little sister ever, and I think that you are the best friend ever, would it be possible, at some point, for you to maybe distract Kyle, who’s going to be Seth’s roommate, so he can’t tell anyone that I may or may not be becoming a woman while I make your brother a man?”

 

“I don’t like Kyle.” She says, realizing, after she’s said it, that it’s really the only thing she can say, that nothing else is inside of her, no real admonishment to Seth and Vanessa’s behavior, no real disagreement to what they plan to do, even though, she realizes, she should, maybe.

 

Because she’s be raised that way, to think sex is something sacred. It is.

 

But why should that mean it isn’t in the situation Vanessa’s laid out to her, and Kate knows sex depends on so many other things besides vows and white dresses and promises of forever.

 

Sometimes it must be a promise of then or now and she loses her train of thought as Vanessa speaks again.

 

“Well, duh. But he likes you.”

 

“Yeah, well. They do checks. Tape on the door so you can’t sneak out. Soooo…” Kate shrugs, crinkles her nose and gives her a closed mouth grin, total shit-eater, Kate knows.

 

“Yeeeah, so what if Seth could you know, sneak out.”

 

“Like climb out the window? Hotel windows don’t open. And Kyle would probably tattle.”

 

“Let’s say he gives Kyle a little tequila-benadryl cocktail.” Vanessa emphasizes _little_ with a gesture of closely approximated thumb and index finger.

 

“And where am I supposed to be when he sneaks in and you two are busy becoming adults?”

 

“Take your iPod and go wait it out in the bathroom. It will be like you aren’t even there, me and Seth will light candles and play music and it will be really nice.”

 

“And I’ll sit next to the toilet while you guys get your fuck on.”

 

“‘Get your fuck on’, _nice_. Didn’t know you knew that word.” Vanessa smiles, nods to herself, says _Fuck_. Again, for emphasis.

 

“I know a whole bunch of cool words.”

 

“Bet you do.”

 

Kate doesn’t say anything. Vanessa looks around, like she’s doing it for effect, like there’s a hidden camera somewhere, “Wonder where you learned them.”

 

Kate shrugs, “Books.”

 

“For sure,” Vanessa nods her head up and down, lips moving in pushes, pops her gum, turns back to face forward as Seth is getting into the driver’s seat.

 

As he pulls out of the gas station Vanessa turns to ask him if he knows anyone who reads a lot of books.

 

“Yeah, there’s this kid I know, buddy holly glasses, six foot monstrous, surly, bigger bra size than Katie-Kakes in the backseat. Think you’ve met him. Matter of fact think he came out of the same sac as me. Holy shit, I think his name is Richard.”

 

Vanessa looks back at her over her shoulder and the angle of the seatbelt strap, waggles her eyebrows, “That’s what I thought. Kate reads a lot, too.”

 

“What smart children we have dear.”

 

“Yes darling, so smart, so pretty, but they’re at that incorrigible age.”

 

“Seventeen and horny. Hope we don’t catch them playing doctor.”

 

Kate rolls down the window while Vanessa lights up two cigarettes, Kate asks for one too, “Bitch, I only have one mouth.” Seth takes his from Vanessa with a laugh, icks over the slick trail on the filter from spit and lipgloss. Kate waits for a blowjob joke, there isn’t one and, oddly, she’s disappointed.

 

“Here you go, baby girl,” Vanessa says handing Kate back a lit cigarette.

 

She waits until they’re both inhaling, “I bet Richie would make a great gynecologist.”

 

The reaction she gets is worth the way they repeat the joke afterwards like they’re the ones who came up with it.

 

Later at the Dew Drop Inn, that sounds cuter than it looks she watches Seth across the pool with the rest of the boys, sees him swim around like shark through bloody water, starting to work Kyle into thinking they are best friends so when the time comes Seth can leave him sleeping off booze and cold medicine while he loses his virginity with Vanessa.

 

Kate thinks it’s sweet.

 

Vanessa asks if anyone’s tasted her cherry pie.

 

Kate waggles her sunscreen slathered hand over Vanessa’s shoulder, promise ring intact like her hymen.

 

“Well if sexual prowess translates through genes,” Vanessa pauses to turn on her cheap pool chair, all plastic straps and rusty metal legs, “you might need to work at things a little bit. Just saying.”

 

Kate wipes down her arms with excess sunscreen, “I’m gonna tell Seth you called him a bad lover. As much as we’ve gotten to, you know.”

 

Vanessa lies her head back, turns it and smiles, softly, “I didn’t say that,” the look on Vanessa face, thoughtful and dreamy makes Kats a little jealous. There’s a long sigh, “He just needed some help to figure things out.” Vanessa grin is dirty, like the way she raises her hand and makes a V for her tongue sit in.

 

“I don’t want to know.”

 

“Well, when you do. I’m here.”

 

“Thanks.”

 

Later at half-past one Kate slinks off to the bathroom with her pillows and a blanket, sits in the empty tub with her iPod and her unappealingly scant phone contact list.

 

She types out all the ways of saying hello she knows, finally sends a ‘u awake’ to Richie.

 

It takes three minutes.

 

‘Yeah, how’s mex’

 

‘good, how’s dad?’

 

‘sleeping, earl came’

 

She wants to type ‘Seth’s going to be coming in Vanessa in like thirty seconds’ but she stops herself. Settles for ‘what are u doin?’

 

‘reading’ and then ‘u?’ within seconds of each other.

 

‘waiting to be allowed back into my room’

 

‘what’s wrong with it’

 

‘seth and nessa’

 

‘highfive him for me’

 

‘gross’

 

‘where r u?’

 

‘sitting in the bathtub’

 

‘bath?’

 

‘world’s most uncomfortable bed’

 

‘too bad’

 

‘why’

 

‘was gonna say send pix’

 

‘thought u were the good one, had me fooled’

 

‘same to u’

 

She send him a smile emoticon, wonders what he would do if she sent a picture of her breasts to him, she isn’t going to, photos are forever, Richie doesn’t care as to his phone’s exact location the same way Seth does.

 

She shuts her eyes, phone in her lap, turning it end over end on her stomach, she opens her eyes looking at the black screen and wants to have it vibrate and light up with an incoming call. It doesn’t.

 

She drops her phone, lazily and it settles against the side of her neck and shoulder.

 

She lifts her hand over her face, stares at her spread fingers, chipping nail polish and promise ring.

 

She wonders what it would look like on someone else’s hand, wonders if it would even fit around one of Richie’s fingers. Decides it might not fit. In the interim of Vanessa and Seth’s first time she thinks about how little she knows.

 

Sex, boy parts, how they fit, how they feel, things she won’t ask Vanessa outright but hopes she’ll offer up once Seth is gone.

* * *

 

 

Things have been happening for a long time, and there's a natural course to it all. Ever since they got from Mexico things have been different like she's made a decision, like she's still making it. They're home alone, it's not odd, it's not new but lying across the foot of his bed, off from school, watching him read she wants things to change and when she sits up he looks up at her.

 

She shuts his book, gently, drops it over the edge of the bed. Her fingers push at his glasses, leave them at the level of his brow before leaning in and kissing his cheeks, lower to his jaw, mouth soft and open on the side of his neck when he tilts, eyes, heavy lidded but open when she pulls back.

 

His hands are still flat on the bed, they move when she looks at them, covering the sides of her thighs, and her mouth opens, feels warmer everywhere watching while they move. One goes no further than her hips, fingers curling under the crenulated waist of her sweatpants, fisting it and she can feel his knuckles, hot and solid through the thick cotton and fleece, tight at the base of her spine.

 

She puts gentle finger-tips over the top of his other wrist, the hand smoothing slowly up the covered inside of her thigh, he dips his head to catch her eyes, and she nudges with her fingers, nonverbal license to keep his line of thought on where his hand was going.

 

Fleetingly it pushes between her legs, a palmful of gentle warmth that doesn’t linger long, fingertips spreading up under her t-shirt, ring finger moving in a circle to trace the outline of her navel and she stares at her smaller fingers against his skin, moves them over and in between his that disappear under thin cotton, the weight of his palm on her breast, nipple on the center of his lifeline.

 

She sighs and his jaw tightens, his hands curve more firmly on what they’re holding.

 

Her free hand lowers his glasses back to his eyes.

 

“Do you want me to take them off?”

 

She shakes her head, he doesn’t frown like she expects, just looks at her mouth and down at the shape of their hands under her shirt.

 

“What do you want me to do?”

 

She shakes her head again, silent for a moment too long but his head doesn’t arch back in irritation and his hands don’t unclench, she in envious of his limitless patience sometimes.

 

“Can we just do this?”

 

He doesn’t nod, just waits until finally he swallows and says, “What is this?” Seeking some sort of clarification she wishes they didn’t need to exchange words for. She shrugs. Pecking a kiss to his cheek, mumble mouthing words on his clavicle, “I don’t know, I just wanted to touch you.”

 

"Me?"

 

“Sometimes I feel like,” she breathes, “feel like you really are my brother, you know?”

 

She doesn’t know if he understands, having someone who’s seen her cry and knows what she likes to eat for breakfast and how late she sleeps in when there’s no school or what she’s like when she’s angry, like a sibling would, but not, and it feels like things are backwards. The understanding and intimacy of their lives without anything stretching over the line, not really, and now she knows what an erection feels like against her hip and what someone else’s hand feels like on her body and she wonders if they were to flip a coin whether the answer would be heads-wrong or tails-about time.

 

“And if I think about someone, it’s not really a person, ever, just someone, but sometimes I guess if I try to think about a person instead then you’re the only one who…you know, ” She can’t say more, cant’ say anything that really spells out what she’s thinking, it’s mortifying, even with Richie, especially with Richie.

 

But he kisses her like he understands, and she knows, maybe, he just might. The nose piece of his glasses digs into her brow and the bridge of her nose but his tongue is slick and hot in her mouth, and she thought it would be harder to learn how to kiss, there’s spit on her chin when she pulls back, presses her hips closer to his. His hand flattens down the back of her sweatpants, feels so much bigger against the bare skin of her backside, his thumb rubbing heat against the bottom of her spine.

 

“New Year’s,” he says against her mouth, “I touched you like this.”

 

“You were really drunk.”

 

His grin imprints on her skin, little boy being bad, “Not that drunk.”

 

She wants to remind him that she had to brush his teeth for him.

 

The hand down the back of her pants starts a rotation to the front, knuckles brushing her mound briefly and she twitches back, just a little, indecision that he notices, hand coming out from under the fabric to settle on her waistband again.

 

“Hey Richie?”

 

“What is it?”

 

She takes her hand off of his, puts both against his chest, spiders the out as far as she can and still finds skin under all ten fingers. His thumb rubs at her nipple, circles around it, her belly shivers.

 

He inhales heavily and her fingers unsplay themselves, drag down to the waist of his flannel pajama pants.

 

“You can touch me.” He says.

 

He doesn’t help her beyond lifting his hips, leaves her to make a decision on whether she wants to cross the line or flip the coin. He shifts when she reaches down inside his pants, skims against his cock with the back of her hand and then her fingers, he’s hot against her palm and he breathes through a barely parted mouth.

 

She isn’t looking until he glances down, glasses slipping, and she pulls his pants down further, pulling down on the fabric over his thighs. Her hand is shaking, and she makes a fist to stop him from seeing, she smiles stupidly, presses her lips together.

 

He looks apprehensive, worried. She shakes her head, pulls herself closer and lays a hand over where his is still flattened over her chest.

 

Pushing her other palm underneath him from root to tip, feels the leakiness from the slit over the heel of her hand, smearing on the inside of her wrist, perfume of sex on her pulse.

 

His bare feet slide up the bed, soles half-covering hers and she takes her hands off of him long enough to shift her t-shirt up and off. His thumb rubs over breast, circling the same way hers does over his tip.

 

“You’re turning pink.” He tells her, eyes on her chest.

 

She pulls off his glasses drops them gently off the side off the bed. So she can kiss him, and so his vision blurs around the edges.

 

His hair comes unstuck in strands, soft but firm under her fingers, combing out pomade, pulling at the back of his neck and she shifts herself over one well-muscled thigh. And it’s exciting, easy even. It’s just Richie.

 

And it’s just Richie’s cock in her hand, but suddenly he’s not just Richie, he’s a boy who she’s touching and it’s something new.

 

He folds his hand around hers, squeezes tighter than she expected anyone would like. His eyes go heavy and his chest pushes against hers with an exhale. Mouth soft and open and she touches his mouth with a thumb, pulling it into a snarl.

 

His thigh jostles her, and she’s soaked, fleecy inside of her sweats slick. She starts a rhythm with her hand that her hips mimic. His mouth opens wide against the front of her throat, down slowly, and then it’s open on one breast, tongue flat against the prod of her nipple and she’s surprised by the sensation, trying to pull back and his hand moved flat between her pinching shoulders, keeping contact and it’s like playing telephone with cans and a wire, vibrations all the way down inside of her.

 

He strains, hips starting to jerk. It feels like a flexed muscle in her hand. Worked out, lurid and he reaches for the corner of the stuck sheet and when that fails her shirt and tries to pull it over their hands. She pushes at his efforts with her knee, slips closer and holds him against her belly and when he twitches, alive and awake under the curl of her fingers she takes a breath moving in abortive strokes on his thigh.

 

It’s not quite as messy as she thought it would be, warmer than she expected, and he squirms under her hips, abdomen and legs unclenching and he comes back down with a hand pressed against her skin where he’s made a mess, fingers slicking through it and she kisses him hard, he’s unprepared and takes his time catching up.

 

“Got you messy.” He breathes. She nods. He smiles. “You’re gonna need to get cleaned up.” Again she nods.

 

He pushes her back hard, tucks himself back under his flannel bottoms, bridges over her body, shadow and smirk and stays up on one palm over her. He needs to squint to see her with the fuzziness of uncorrected vision.

 

His fingers make patterns in what’s still painting her skin, it’s getting tacky and he tells her cum was used as invisible ink by spies during world war two and beyond. Every man’s an inkwell or something like that, he can’t remember the exact phrase.

 

He licks, long and filthy from stomach to collar and pulls the waistband of her pants away from her skin, lets it snap back, does it again.

 

He puts his mouth back over her breast, sucks, working his tongue around, making marks and she puts hands on his shoulder blades, says, “I like that.” And her small admission is annunciated by the garage door going up, loud destructive sound and he swallows, hands bookending her waist, rolls his damp forehead over her sternum.

 

“Seth’s home.”

 

He takes a long moment to sit back, so long it makes her antsy about how fast or slow Seth is making his way around to getting upstairs.

 

It’s a few quick jerky moves before she gets her shirt back on and her body out from under him and off the bed. Richie reaches for her arm, holds her in place and she can hear Seth on the stairs, Richie is smirking, gives her a once over that lasts too long and promises ‘later’, she’s too anxious about discovery to nod properly or give an answer back.

She escapes before Seth gets off the stairs, finishes in her own bed, quickly and quietly. Richie taps out morse code on the wall.

* * *

 

It’s everything suddenly. It’s all, she tries to find a word and can’t. Then does, it’s _heavy_. Richie’s stare follows her, it did before but now it says something different. She thinks she’s different, she’s seen a boy come, made one come.

 

Summer time is about laying in the sun and running around the block once dusk cools things down, about getting buzzed on sweet-tangy-sticky drinks with too much gin or vodka, church meetings and youth group parties and now it’s like something out of a shitty PG-13 movie with teenagers having the almost final summer before adult life takes hold, except the way they stare at each other doesn’t say make-outs.

 

She can hear him say, “I’m going to eat you out,” even after he actually says it, even when it doesn’t actually happen, knock on the front door stopping his hand as it sways between her legs, fingers waving, moving against the inside of her thighs, under her floral church dress.

 

It’s Uncle Earl at the door, he’s taking her daddy and them out to dinner. It’s a surprise. She and Richie sit in the back, pick up her daddy at the church, and she can feel the heat of his thigh against hers for the entire car ride, the entire dinner, finds herself missing it when they get back home and they aren’t sitting inches away from each other.

 

His bare foot on her socked one while they watch movies with Seth in the den, Casino and Goodfellas, his body, big and warm, against her side at the breakfast counter, all the small touches keep her in a state of animal awareness. It’s the dog days of summer and she’s dying of more than heat.

 

She touches herself at night and thinks about all the ways they used to talk about it in youth group without ever actually _talking about it_.

 

She had a sleepover once, four girls, her and her two best friends who didn’t go to church, and one girl she saw every Wednesday in the pews, someone she’d pair up with in class for a project but never interact with except in a tangential way.

 

In that finished basement that still smelt damp during that sleepover her two best friends from grade school talked about how they couldn’t do _it_ with fingers, that it felt weird, she didn’t know what they were talking about, the girl from youth group was silent, pretending to be sleeping.

 

‘Oh! You don’t know?’ And there’d been embarrassment without explanation.

 

She gets it now, the words no one says, the natural learning everyone gets on their own.

 

She touches herself and thinks about Richie. They’ve had all the intimacy built up over years, in reverse, it’s not derived from attraction, not at first, they grew up together and she rationalizes the strangeness.

 

They grew up together, watched each other grow up, they didn’t convince themselves of something that wasn’t there.

 

It happened. They were kids together but they aren’t kids anymore.

* * *

 

 

It’s Sunday morning and she needs to brush her teeth, Richie in the shower, Seth’s putting on his suit. She knocks first, listens to the ‘come in’ and shuffles inside still in her pajamas.

 

“It’s me.”

 

“I know,” he says over the spray and then as it shuts off, “you knock different.”

 

She makes a sound of assent around toothpaste. Only looks at him because he makes it a point to step out and stand behind her, he’s pink skinned and has the tan-lines boys get that makes their legs anemically pale compared to their torsos. Except, now he’s pink assed, kneed, elbowed, like he’s blushing everywhere. She rinses her mouth, wipes it on the back of her hand.

 

“Need the shower?”

 

“I took one last night.”

 

She pushes a towel from the rack into his hands. He grins, wipes off his glasses set down on the sink basin, puts them on and then puts a palm between her legs, she sways and goes up on tiptoes, mouth falling open.

 

His is warm and open on the back of her neck, nosing her hair over her shoulder and breathing deeply against her nape.

 

“We gotta be ready soon.”

 

“We will be.”

 

“It will take too long.”

 

“I’m going to sneak into your room tonight.”

* * *

 

 

She loses her virginity under the blankets in her own bed late at night while her daddy sleeps downstairs, while Seth is sleeping the first night of college away in his dorm room and Richie sucks marks on her skin, in places her clothes will cover.

 

She makes him go back to his own bed before morning and spends the whole next morning in bed, stays home from school, and looks at her promise ring.

 

Eventually she takes it off and smiles at the way her finger looks without it.

 

 

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At least one chapter to go, if not two. Enjoy.

 

It takes a while for sex to become the thing she’s built it up to.

 

They do it again, at night in her bed a few days later. She has a better idea of where her legs are supposed to be and how not to get her hair caught under his hands. The third time is a few hours before school a week later, Seth's been gone for two days. She sneaks under his blankets, reaches hands down under his sweat-pants and strokes.

 

She likes to watch his face, run fingers over the muscles between his hips, the sides of his thighs, hickeys the patch of skin between shoulder and neck, they use so many tissues in the clean up her father asks Richie if he would like to go to the doctor, see if they might have something for his allergies.

 

Richie always looks at her face, pouty and flushed, her insides clutch under his stare, flutter for a moment but she hasn’t had an orgasm during. Not yet, anyway.

 

It’s just pressure inside, warmth, the pinch that comes from him moving too fast or too far too soon and she’ll grimace, he’ll kiss her sloppily, never waits quite long enough before he moves again.

 

* * *

 

 

“Kate,” his voice with a hitch, “What do you like?”

 

She can’t answer on the spot. It just makes her babble silently, starts a checklist in her brain that’s blank.

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“Think about it.”

 

She nods mutely, presses fingers against his shoulder blade.

 

* * *

 

He pulls her down in the nest of laundry load comforter and sheets. Her run’s left her sweat sticky, it’s too warm to be close to another human dose of body heat. But she squirms, she’s been edgy and he’s been grumpy, no time alone now that school’s started and senior year is counting down to graduation. Her dad’s been more awake, more aware, more everywhere in the house all the time. But not right now.

 

Richie’s undressing her, undressing himself and they sit, panties to shorts, breasts to chest and her hair is a nuisance once he snaps her hair band into a long piece of useless elastic.

 

She leans back, ready to let him cover her but his hands hold her tight, coax her up to her knees, yanking her panties down in increments, stretching them around her knees, raising one at a time, she kicks them off the ankle they get stuck around.

 

She pulls on his shoulders.

 

“You should be on top,” she urges. But he doesn’t curve over to cover her, just nudges up with the bob of his covered erection against her naked cunt.

 

“Want you on top,” he tells her, serious, no pleading, no beg in his voice just a statement to let her know what he wants. It’s easier for boys she decides, to say what they want.

 

He stares at her, clear vision through his eyeglass correction. It makes her newly nervous, his inquisitive eyes. It’s not nighttime, she’s not under blankets and she presses close so her chest is against his, keeps her hips pressed tight to his so he can’t see her there either.

 

“I’m sore.”

 

“Don’t be lazy.”

 

His tone is lazy, tone even. She chews the inside of her cheek.

 

“Just fuck me. I want you to.”

 

His fingers are cupping her, thumb slipping between her folds to open her up, gentle rub on her clit, a press and she’s open mouthed, panting. His fingers pull away, gentle strands of leaky wetness breaking on his fingerpads.

 

“Fuck me.” His voice is low, rough. It makes her nervous-hot.

 

Her fingers are useless in pulling at his weekend boxer shorts, he doesn’t help and she scratches the skin of his hips, just a little catch that he temporarily jerks away from.

 

“That’s it.” He says, quiet, soft, when she’s got a hand around him, goes up on her knees and gets him where he needs to be, it’s different, almost easy, it makes her aware of her more than him. Self-absorption centered between her thighs, and the nudge of her body moving down on him.

 

It feels more like fucking herself for a moment, looking at the same spot between his clavicles, hair sticking on her chest and shoulders.

 

He stays very still, breathes heavy, watching a part of him disappear inside of her. She closes her eyes, inhales slowly when he’s almost all the way inside. He holds the curve of each hip and just waits, she feels him out. Likes it.

 

Her clit and mons fit snug against the hard notch of bone where he’s got dishwater blonde curls. He’s pulling her hips, up, prompting movement. It feels like she's knocking on the wall again, she knows she looks more lost, less able to breathe, than he does.

 

She moves with shallow strokes, unsure and unable to find a real rhythm. She kisses him before he says whatever he opens his mouth to say. It’s sloppy and toothy and he dips back for another, groans against the mush of her mouth, holds hands around her ass and she comes up too fast from simple grind against him, makes a sound as he slips free but still kept between them, against her lazy circling hips and damp phantom nudges. He makes a sound too. It makes her feel bad, like a little girl who doesn’t know what she’s doing.

 

“Sorry.”

 

She holds her hair behind her ears, lets him push back in. Holds his bicep and the edge of her bed. His smooth up to flatten on her shoulder blades, “Alright?”

 

“Yeah.” She pants, breathless, he smells like sweat, something a touch acrid, the way men smell.

 

She moves her legs, her feet trying to find something to flatten on.

 

The side of his thighs and ass she nudges with her toes, knees bruising against the side of the bedframe, and he moves his legs. They're closer this way, he breathes and she feels it all the way down her front, they stick together like tape, it's like falling asleep.

 

And after, “Hey, Katie-kakes.”

 

“What?”

 

“You’ve got a cream filling,” he prods with finger tips.

 

“Don’t,”

 

“Don’t what?”

 

“When you say stuff like that,” her cheek on his throat, hair stuck on his skin like a scarf.

 

“Like what?”

 

“Dirty stuff.”

 

“You don’t like it.”

 

“It’s just," she thinks, she can't find an appropriate word for the filthy sentiment, "a lot.”

 

“Of what?”

 

His fingers pet.

 

“…that.”

 

“This?”

 

They wiggle. She feels dirty, the kind of lazy and indulgent dirty that happens over long vacations from school, it feels animal and when he stretches she has him roll over onto her, "guess you're not still sore."

 

* * *

 

 

There’s a vague exhale of, “oh, shit.”

 

He’s back on his haunches, repositioned, looking down at her and for a moment she can’t get a breath. She’s got a hand twisting the open end of his pillowcase. She breathes out, “yeah.”

 

He smiles, hair mussed, falling in stuck together strands over his forehead, brows, eyes. He shuffles back, toes in the sheets behind him and pulls a hand from her hip, licks his thumb and nudges her clit with it in slippery circles, soft and careful and she needs to close her eyes.

 

“I don’t like that.” She breathes, pushing away his hand and pushing up her hips to drag against his own. His solitary touches feel like tiny electric sparks down her legs, it's too raw. Having the sensation dragged out makes her edgy, uncomfortable. She puts her hand between them and shows him how to rub.

 

He puts his mouth on her, open and hot. His tongue slicks up, it's a different kind of brutality, in her hand his glasses make a sound in her fist, the creak of near ruin, she presses a foot to his shoulder, reluctant and pushing, he holds her thighs wide and barely looks up, his thumb rubbing circle on her instep. Her face is damp and half the fun is the struggle, he moves her so easily and with such little force something in her, something unsettling and amoral, thrills, forces him to hold tighter because it feels better. He comments on it in ways that make her ears turn red.

 

"You squirm like that I'll have to hold you down next time."

 

She exhales roughly on his throat, hopeful, eager.

* * *

 

Inevitably Seth catches them.

 

None of them react the way she thought she would, Seth’s surly angry silence following the worst surprise he’s ever had, Richie nonchalance and the way he keeps moving for a handful of thrusts, 'get out, shut the door', her own shame.


End file.
